


Rear-view mirror

by MechanicalHeart



Category: Last Shadow Puppets
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Bisexuality, Drama, Drugs, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:08:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 50,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23378872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MechanicalHeart/pseuds/MechanicalHeart
Summary: Miles drives a cab for a living. One day, he runs into a client with an expensive style and a huge mansion. Miles gets a peek at his life of fame and fortune, while he stares at him from the backseat. His eyes will haunt Miles for much longer than he had ever expected.
Relationships: Miles Kane/Alex Turner
Comments: 44
Kudos: 79





	1. Cigarettes

Quitting cigarettes is one of the better decisions I have ever made.

It sounds obvious but it was not, not to me. Smoking was second nature to me. Every spare moment I had could, in theory and often in practice, be filled with a smoke. Standing in the cold or the driving rain: no problem; leaving a pleasant restaurant or pub to stand outside shivering in my coat: fine with me. Ruining a client's ride because of the smell of my taxi's interior? Unacceptable. That's when I quit, cold turkey: when an old guy in a nicely tailored, but overall boring, plain suit complained about the scent. We were about five minutes in, another ten to go. He was headed for a congress center outside of town. Many others shared his destination that week, but he didn't look like a businessman: his aura was more like that of a diplomat, a politician. Public office, maybe. The outfit, combined with the empty expression gave it away. He looked like a man who had been tired for so many weeks on end he has accepted that this exhaustion is his new state of being. But at the same time, he was awake enough to stay alert. His expression changed- very slightly, almost unnoticeable, but I have a trained eye for these things- when I passed an intersection while the large congress building was visible on our left side, in the distance. I could tell what was coming before he opened his mouth.  
“Think we need to make a left turn, here.”  
“Not today, Sir, but well spotted. There's a lot of roadworks that way and we unfortunately need to make a detour.”

“Hm.” He held on to his old-fashioned suitcase, pressing it to his chest. His body language clearly said he was hoping he wouldn't have to share this space with me much longer. Maybe he had had a bad experience with taxi drivers, once or twice. I knew better than to feel insulted by his discomfort. To the person taking a cab, all drivers are part of a homogeneous species. Meet one single rude driver and you spend each consecutive taxi ride afterwards slightly expecting the same thing to happen again. You can't blame them. Cab drivers and regular folk rarely meet outside of a car. And when we do, we make sure not to mention our occupation. It makes conversation tedious after the novelty has worn off. We answer the same questions until there are no more questions. (“Do you often work late?” “Do people throw up in your car a lot?” “Do you ever get punched when you present your bill?” A big, sad ‘Yes’ to all.) Then, the embarrassment kicks in. It's pretty much unavoidable no matter what you tell yourself. The job is only as classy as the customers you have, which, in my case, used to mean not at all. 

I noticed the man was fidgeting with the door windows.

“Your vehicle could use some airing out.”  
“My apologies, Sir,” I replied politely while opening the window for him. He was relieved when he breathed in the fresh air; his brow relaxed and so did his jaw.   
“That's much better.”  
“You're welcome.”

I kept my customer service smile on my face until I had delivered the man as near the front door as I could manage. Once he was comfortably out of sight, my face dropped to its usual chagrin. I threw my crumbled pack of cigarettes in the garbage next to the large revolving doors and drove to my next job with all the windows rolled down. I found my emergency stash in the dashboard and threw that out, too.  
It wasn’t just my own lungs and dignity that I worried about. In recent years, our profession had dwindled by ‘gig economy’ car sharing services which I shall not name. I had the good name and google ratings of my employer to keep in mind, as well. If this was what was required of me I would do my part.

So, now, whenever I see a group of smokers, huddled together, but still alone in their own addiction, I feel pity more than I feel nostalgia. I haven't missed the taste of tobacco in years. It had been about damn time I kicked that habit. I am saving money every month now and besides, it felt like a rite of passage, as if I hadn't really been a grown-up as a smoker; as if I had celebrated an imaginary second 21st birthday the day I became a quitter. And I like to believe it did something for me, as if throwing those cartons in the trash that day worked like a lucky charm in my professional life. And I never even smoked in my cab. Just standing outside it. That fact alone should speak volumes about what my job means to me. To me, it does. As I said, I haven't missed tobacco in years. The scent makes me nauseous, as it does to many other quitters. Something bloody spectacular has to happen before I even start to consider buying a casual pack. It happened today. You probably wouldn't call it spectacular but that's just because you don't know the history behind it, yet. It wasn't an emergency situation or the biggest traffic jam of all time. I wasn't even having a bad day; work was fine, weather was okay-ish, when I saw my own face in the mirrors I didn't hate what I was looking at. Everything was cool, balanced out. I wasn't thinking of much and I didn't have to. I was at the airport, the biggest one around here, waiting for a client. These things could take a while. I checked arrival times and this client's flight number every fifteen minutes or so, and the remaining time I spent absent-minded, listening to music on my phone. I remembered I had brought a book with me, a pretty old print, about eighty years old, translated from French. I reached inside the glove compartment to get it when I noticed him. He was right beside me, just a few steps away. Smoking in the designated spot next to the taxi stops. I looked at him. He wouldn't have been able to see me, my windows are blinded, but still, I hunched up a bit. He has a way of making me feel small. Not always in a negative way.

He had a big suitcase standing next to him. It was new, I guess. I didn't recognise the coat, either. Looked rather thin for the chilly weather outside. It suited him well. I assume he liked the fit so much he just had to wear it. 

I felt weird sitting there staring at him, so I picked up my book. But of course, the words just danced in front of my eyes. When he finished his cigarette and walked through the revolving doors, I hadn't read a single word. My hands trembled slightly when I reached for my phone. It annoyed me more than I had expected. Anyway, my client's flight had landed by that time and I proceeded to dial his number. After a couple of tries he picked up and I explained him where I was parked. He found me within minutes; a smart-witted young business guy. Did something with printers, I believe. He was a welcome distraction and I was glad to leave the airport's parking strip behind. 

“Reading Flaubert?” the guy pointed at the book I had forgotten to put back inside the glove box.

“Ah. Yes, I am.” I stowed it away.

“I had to read that in school.”  
“Really? You are French by any chance?”  
“I'm from Belgium.”  
“You have no accent, at all.”  
“Thank you. We all had to read that in class. How do you like it?”  
“Well, it's... I am re-reading it, to be honest. I find it funny.”  
“Funny? That's the first time I have heard someone describe Flaubert as funny.”  
“I find it difficult to feel any other way about it. It's pretty hilarious.”  
“Maybe it's because we had to read it in class. I usually enjoy reading, you know, for fun, for myself. It changes when there is an assignment tied to it.”  
“Oh, I get that, Sir.”  
“Who knows, I might find it amusing if I read it today. Do you reckon?”  
“It's likely. It is not much else but small-town drama and petty ego's.”  
“Is it? I do remember a bit of it. What was it... a farm wedding. Oh, and some cheating scandal.”  
“That is the main event. Our old Madame is a mess, but so is everybody else.”

He laughed at that. “Then I should try giving it a second chance.”

My taxi drives are pleasant, these days. The clients are different, more high-end, in a way. I get the sense that they have found us through corporate travel agencies, instead of finding us on their own. I get different assignments than I used to. My boss coordinates who gets to do what, and he told me he matches the driver to the customer on pure intuition. He told me it's mostly about style. A taxi drive is expensive, a luxury - and it should feel that way. Clients want to believe they are spending their money, or their company's money, well. My clients started to improve once my fashion sense started to improve. It's hard to believe, because my boss is capable of wearing washed-out shorts on short-sleeved collared shirts, but he has an eye for these things on others and notices them the moment you walk through the door. My recent looks must have given a favourable impression. He gives me the most relaxed, distinctive, good-looking travelers these days, where I used to drive mostly regular folks with a fair share of drunken idiots thrown in the mix now and then. You can physically see the money dripping from my current passengers. It's not just what they wear; it's in their composure, a certainty that nothing bad will happen to them, that it is no big deal even if they get ripped off or robbed. 

Which brings me back to him, unfortunately. Mr. Turner. Alex. Alex and his well-fitted, thin coat, and his cigarettes. In many ways, he was the reason I cleaned up my act so much. The root cause. On the other hand, he was bad for me. A poison with a slow burn. 


	2. Receipt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fairly uneventful taxi drive for a high-profile client.

One of my coworkers is half Italian. His name is Federico (that's what he says, at least, even though I have had a peek at his license one time when he gave me a lift home at the end of our shifts and it clearly read just "Fred") and he always gets the best customers. The only time he does not, is when he is unavailable: either stuck in traffic or off the job to spend time with his kid, who just turned two years old. My boss loves him. His face lights up when Federico enters his smudgy office. The reason is plain to see: Federico is gorgeous, as simple as that. He may be half Italian but he is far from short. He is about my height, has thick, black hair, and manages to have both a scruffy stubble and a soft, olive-coloured skin. He somehow finds the time to work out, and work out a lot. His shoulders are broad and he could lift suitcases packed with bricks if you'd ask him to. These traits wouldn't have meant much if they hadn't been paired with a legendary fashion sense. Federico knows what suits him and he never wears anything that is worth less than half his salary. Ever. Even his socks look as though they have been tailored to the millimeter. 

“How do you manage?” I asked him once. 

“Good clothes last,” he replied. And I guess that is true. Still, for me to even get close to his apparel I would need to save up my tips for at least a year. And I didn't get a sliver of the cash his clients happily hand him. The reason behind this is the same as the reason why my boss likes him so much. Attractive people, well, they attract others. Others want to be around them and in the process, they may give more attention to them than they would any regular lad like, for instance, myself. And attention does not always translate to affection. Many times it just translates to money. And I have to admit that it would be a shame if Federico ever ran out of money to adorn himself the way that he does. 

It was a normal day, by all accounts. It was early March and the winter chill was still in the air. I tried to hide away in my coat, even if I only had to walk a hundred steps to Vince's office. 

“Morning,” he greeted me as I walked in, hunched over an immense pile of receipts. Probably the gas station receipts, since it was a Tuesday. All driving staff dropped their receipts in a designated box that was emptied on Mondays.  
“Morning, boss.”  
“Cold, inn'it?”  
“Oh, it's freezing. I can't believe it's above zero.”  
“Saw a few schoolkids on bikes this morning. No gloves- again! Honestly, I don't understand it. How much are gloves, these days, anyway? Can't be more than a tenner.” Vince shook his head, exasperated. “My hands would fall right off. Used to wear gloves in the car, as well.”

“That sounds like a good plan.”  
“It is a good plan!” he looked up as if I had been trying to start an argument- I hadn't. “You get yourself a good pair of gloves, Kane, preferably lined with sheep's wool. No acrylic fake nonsense. Those'll keep you warm even when the heater breaks. You never know when that happens. Could be when you're lost on Christmas Eve. Oh, and they improve your grip, you know, on the steering wheel.”  
“I'll look into that.”  
“Yeah, you do that.” He glanced at the receipts on his desk and I turned to the window. It was best to make myself as small and unnoticeable as possible while I was waiting there. Vince could blow right up when drivers made too much noise. ‘Too much noise’ could mean anything from a car horn in the parking area to whistling a pop song in the hallway. The phone rang, and even without looking at Vince I knew the ringing broke his concentration. 

“Musgrave taxi services,” he grumbled, but his tone changed spectacularly as soon as he realised it was Federico. “Wardle! What made you dial the hotline this lovely morning?”

Federico took off on one of his long-winded rants but Vince interrupted him. “Okay. So, if I understand what you are saying you are unable to do the assignment today. Yes. You are stuck. No, I understand. Happens to the best of us. The problem is that I do not have a suitable replacement. How long did you say? An hour? Hm. No, don't worry about it, I'll find a way. And the client's arrival time is... no. No, no, no, that won't do. No, you're quite correct. Yes. Thank you. See you later today, eh? Oi, Kane!”  
I turned around. “Yes, Sir?”  
“Wardle's stuck in traffic. He can't make it back to Manchester in time. Here's the flight number-“ he scribbled some information on a note- “and arrival time.”  
“I thought you didn't have a suitable replacement.”  
“Since you were standing right here collecting dust I didn't think it'd be too much of a bother.” And, when I pretended to hesitate: “Take the damn job, Kane. This one is high profile. What do you want me to do, hand it to Marvin?”

I took the note. “Where will this person be?”  
“Arrivals. Where did you think? And it's a Mister.”  
“I didn't mean to upset you,” I smirked.

“Get on with it, Kane.”

Federico called me when I was almost at the airport. Even from where I was coming from the traffic was bad, and it was about the only passage to the airport without any construction works that week or accidents that morning. 

“Mornin', Miles.”  
“Bongiorno to you, too.”  
“Piss off, mate. It's too early for this. I just sent the guy your number. Alright?”  
“Cheers.”  
“He might call you. I'm not sure if he'll want to go look for you.”  
“Really.”  
“Yeah. He doesn't want too many people recognising him, you know, so it's best if the whole pick-up thing is over quickly, you know?”

“Recognising him? From where? He has a criminal record or what?”  
“He's a musician, I believe. He didn't tell me much the last time, but I remember him. He carried two guitar cases.”  
“Oh.”  
“Yeah.”  
“Is this one of our agency customers?”  
“He is.”

“Right. Well, I'm almost there. Thanks for the info.”

“Anytime.”

It would have been better if I remembered more details of that morning. There are some I can still recall: the drizzle that turned into a full-blown haze when we left the airport and made the turn to the motorway; the two guitar cases he was carrying; and the multiple rings around his fingers. They made it sort of painful when we first shook hands. Other than that, I don't remember much. We may have exchanged a few words; I honestly don’t know anymore. The main thing that stood out to me was the house. 

“Apologies. Am I going the right way?” I asked him a couple of times. 

“Yeah, you are,” he answered each time. He was soft-spoken that day, his voice slightly higher than I had thought it would be based on how he looked. “You have the correct address.”

“I'm sorry, Sir.”

I couldn't help it. I just had trouble believing the mansion was his. The long driveway, the large white stones in its walls. I tried to contain myself and did not make any comment when the pool came into view, or when Alex had to step out of the car to open the front gate by entering a security code. I don't know why I was this surprised about any of it, either. Young people can be rich. I didn't know many rich young people, but then again, I was a taxi driver. Out of necessity, in a bad economic slump, but still a taxi driver. Most of my peers were taxi drivers, too, or worked in shops or at primary schools. The kids from my school who had left for college now seemed to be perfectly normal people, just with slightly higher salaries and the slightly higher expenses higher salaries can entail. Nobody I even remotely knew had what this client had. My train of thought left a sour taste in my mouth. I was basing it entirely on stereotypes and assumptions. Plus, it was none of my business. I didn't need to think about my customer's life at all. That is what I repeated to myself, driving slowly on the gravel path, straight like an arrow pointing at the house. 

I dropped him off and brought his suitcases to the front door. The heavy clouds had dispersed and the fresh scent of mowed grass was in the air.  
“That other door is better,” he said. 

“No problem, Sir.” I turned around and put the suitcases on the step next to a smaller door to the side, about thirty steps away from the main door. All curtains were closed and the lights were off. It was silent except for my shoes on the gravel and the wind in the large trees along the driveway. For a moment, I could physically feel the distance between us and the regular world, outside of the gate. It was strange to realise that I was still somewhere on the outskirts of greater Manchester. I turned around. He had followed me to the door. I blinked at him, not knowing what to say. 

“You will send my agency the bill? Like last time?”

“Yes, that is the standard procedure.”

“Good. So, you do not have a receipt?”  
“A receipt is not necessary for the invoice to get processed, but I can give you one, if you want it?”  
He seemed to give my question some thought. It was a question people pondered, sometimes.

“Yes, I want your receipt.”

“I'll go get you one.”

I walked over to my car and grabbed a receipt from my notepad. It was pre-filled with Musgrave Taxi Services’s address and contact details and had some columns: date – driver - origin – destination – distance – price. I used them often, since I mostly handled the transportation of regular citizens. Perhaps a driver like Federico did not.   
I scribbled the date, the amount and my name on the note and handed it to my client, who was waiting for me with the keys to his mansion in his hand.  
“There you are, Sir.”  
“Thank you.”  
“Have a good day, then.”  
“Same to you.”  
  


Apart from the house, it was a fairly uneventful taxi drive, wouldn’t you think so? I thought as much. I thought nothing about it; I had probably forgotten all about it as soon as I had left the grounds. The peculiar things happened long after that, months later. (I didn’t quite remember the date, but I looked it up, and it was, in fact, two months later.)


	3. A mysterious darkness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some people bare their entire soul to cabbies.  
> Alex has a tale for Miles about the desert, divination, and the devil.

Vince really needs to work on his fitness. Us drivers tell him that all the time, mostly because many of us practically have our living quarters in one of the cheap gyms our town has to offer, but he never heeds our advice and his stomach keeps growing. One day, he won't be able to reach his desk from where he is sitting, or at least, that is what we used to joke about. It's all perfectly reasonable. The man is far too busy with his company to even think about his own future well-being. There are things a manager does us employees do not stop to consider. I am talking about things a good boss does, not a sneaky capitalist pig. Looking after our insurance, checking changes in regulations, all that kind of stuff. Vince is a good guy and we have no complaints. When he starts running, though, we all can't help but laugh.

We were standing outside of the office when he approached us, puffing and with a huge, red face. He wasn't going quickly at all. He stopped his jog the moment he knew his voice would carry far enough for us to hear it.

"Kane!" he yelled and made a vague gesture before stumbling back inside.  
I looked at the others, Paul and Teddy, with an exaggerated puzzled look on my face.   
"That was a challenge, Kane. You'd better change into your running shoes. You have no chance against him wearing those chic loafers," Paul grinned.

"I think he wants you to follow him," Teddy said, always the helpful type, but not too quick on his wits.

"Yeah. I'll go and see what was worth getting his heart worked up over."

I paced over to the office on my, indeed, chic loafers. They were still very new and my feet hadn't gotten used to them yet.  
"Kane," Vince greeted me. He had returned to his office chair and was holding his phone high in the air.

"What's up, Vince?"  
He regained his breath and started his explanation. "There's a lady on the phone, here," he said. "Agency lady. She says she has had a request for you, personally."  
"Is that so?"

"She says her client mentioned your name but I can't find you on this assignment. According to her, this job was done on March 5th." He turned his monitor around so I could have a look. "It says Federico."  
I squinted my eyes and looked at the screen. "PINEGROVE LUXURY TRAVEL AGENCY" was in the column 'client'. "WARDLE" was under 'driver'.   
"That is what it says."  
"So, where is this lady getting Kane from?"  
"Hmm, I can't say."

"But can I tell them you'll take it?"  
"Wait, this is about a job?"  
"Yes, of course it is." Vince looked at me like he would at a toddler.   
"Sure, I suppose. Do you have details?"  
"Today. Eight-thirty PM. Pick-up at the airport, same address as the last time. She says it’s the Air France flight from Paris arriving at eight. You're available tonight, right?"  
"I am."  
"Okay." He returned to the phone call. "Hi. Thank you for waiting, ma'am. Yes, we have our driver Mr. Kane here and he's available. No problem. Just a question... Our records mention a different driver for the job in March."

I stood in the corner, impatient and feeling slightly nervous all of a sudden. I knew who the woman's customer was and for some reason, I didn't feel up to it. I didn't know why. I checked my watch- I had about three hours left before I would have to be at the airport. I had to somehow manage to cram a dinner in, too. Probably kebab at Ismail's place. His brother was one of us and he would always nag us to try Ismail's kebab. Once we did, we realised it was fantastic. We haven't moved to a different kebab supplier since.

"Okay, well, if your client specifically... Yes. Yes, of course. We aim to please, ma'am. Haha! Of course. All taken care of. Yes. Thank you for the assignment. You, too."  
He dropped the phone on the hook and looked up to me. "I have no idea why, but they are certain they're looking for you, Kane."  
"Yes. I know who it is. I took over that job from Federico."  
"Well if you knew, why didn't you say so?" He looked at me as if I had just punched him on the nose.  
"I only just remembered."  
"Now this posh lady thinks my administration is sub-par," he scoffed, "when it is nothing of the sort. Get going, Kane. The least you can do for me is be flawless today."  
"At your service, chief."  
He shook his head at my military salute. "I know you are serious around clients, so why can't you be serious around your employer?"  
"It depends on what the other person inspires in me."  
"Well, you inspire me to not give you that end of the year bonus this time. Already. And we're not even at the halfway point."  
"Rest assured, Sir, I will not disappoint you."

"A boy can dream."

I ate my kebab at Ismail, sitting at one of his formica tables, admiring the tacky decor. The funniest part of it was that Ismail was well aware that his shop lacked a certain modernity. He often talked about his trips to well-known clubs downtown and the designer stuff he bought for his own interior, bragging how he spent two hundred pounds on a lamp or a tablecloth. He made it sound like a long complaint about the outrageous retail prices these days, but his huge, glowing grin gave his true feelings away. When it came to his shop he just couldn't be arsed to do much about it. He wasn't making enough money to spend it on frivolous nonsense like working lights or a correct menu. The most important aspects were all there: a cash register, a PIN machine that always worked, and the best kebab I knew. His customers didn't care, either, as long as they could have their spicy, greasy sandwich or their pizza. I had tried all of the items on his menu and they were all great, no complaints here. When I walked towards the door I made sure to grab a big serving of mints and a pile of napkins.  
"Leaving already?" Ismail laughed from behind the huge oven. "You took what, five minutes to finish all of that?"  
"I have a big mouth," I joked and hurried back to my car. My traffic apps had warned me that the roads were starting to get full.

When I was about ten minutes away from the airport he called me. All of our taxis are equipped with hands-free devices but it would have been fine had he called me on my cell. The cars around me were moving so slowly I could have driven to the airport with my eyes shut.

"Good evening, Sir, this is Kane, Musgrave Taxi Services. How can I help you?" I went through my standard phone greeting.  
"Yo. It's Alex Turner. Just wondering when you'll be here."  
"Considering the traffic around the airport I expect to take another ten minutes, Sir. My apologies."  
"That's okay. I'm at international arrivals. Like last time."  
I knew where that was. I had been there hundreds of times. It would have been the very first place I would have tried, if I had been unable to find him.  
"Understood, Sir. I'll be there to pick you up."  
"See you then." He hung up before I could say anything else.

Now, it sounded as if he did not mind the delay all that much, but if I have some wisdom to share, I will tell you that people are different on the phone. They are not only thinking about the person on the other end of the line. They are also mindful of the people around them, and the receiver is not, since he is not there. I have had conversations with the most pleasant sweethearts you could imagine, only to find they were feral with rage once I arrived. The most common explanation is that their families were around when they made the call; or worse: their children. Some might disagree with me but I prefer it if customers make it clear who they are and how they are feeling from the beginning, impressions on their loved ones be damned. Isn't it worse to have a friendly person in your midst and have them show you their real face much later, or on their terms, when they themselves feel like dropping their mask? I know what I prefer.

I had nothing to worry about that day. He was alone, again, having a smoke next to the revolving doors. The huge "ARRIVALS" sign looked to be hovering above him and made him appear smaller than he really was. He was about the size of the 'I', I thought when I walked over to greet him.

"Hi." He breathed a puff of smoke, immediately blown apart by the strong, warm wind. There was a hint of a smile on his face. I figured he wasn't too bothered by my tardiness. To be safe, I went for the formal route.  
"Good evening, Sir. Just let me know when you're ready, then I will take your luggage to the car."  
"Care for a smoke?" he asked, offering me his cigarette carton.  
"I'm sorry, Sir, thank you, but I don't smoke."  
"Hmpf," he chuckled. "Boring family man, are ya?"  
"Not a family man," I answered. "Boring, maybe."  
He squinted his eyes and took a step back to get a better view of me. "I don't believe that."  
Feeling a bit uptight (because this felt like an inspection, like the ones I had been subjected to sometimes in the days when I was still playing football), I shrugged.   
"I drive a cab from A to B. Pretty boring, I'd say."  
"But surely, you are more than your day job."  
"I suppose."   
I wondered what his end game was. Maybe he was simply making conversation. But the look in his eyes... I wouldn't bet on it. Maybe he would try to impress me later, by providing all the details of his - without a doubt - rock star life. In music, even small fry had stories to tell, and from what I had heard this guy was not small fry at all. I didn't want to hear the long macho rambles about cocaine and whores and the various body parts of those whores he had snorted said cocaine from, not any of it. I checked his cigarette, judging its process. It was almost finished. He followed my gaze. “I’ll be done in a moment.”  
“Oh, no, Sir, please. Take your time.”  
“This your last job of the day?”  
“I don’t think so. I started at four this afternoon, so I probably won’t be done until two in the morning.”  
“I was up until four last night. Couldn’t sleep. Jetlag, I guess.”  
“Sounds like a rough schedule.”  
“It is.” He put out his cigarette in the ashtray and picked up his bag.  
“I’ll take that, Sir,” I said and took the larger suitcase. It wasn’t heavy. “I’ll do my best to get you home as soon as possible so you can get some rest, eh?”  
He laughed at that. “Thanks.”

This is the day things started to feel a little off. Not in a negative sense. It didn’t bother me so much rather than intrigue me. At first, we shared a bit of polite chit-chat. Most clients are able to hold a short conversation, even when they’re tired, before they check out, jetlagged out of their skull. Think comments about the day’s weather, where they have been on their travels, what they have done while there. Nothing too intrusive. If you do get intrusive, before you know it, some types are clinging to you as their personal therapist, desperate to know what a normal chap like myself would do in their situation. For some reason, taxi drivers are viewed by some as travelling wise-cracking oracles. I understand that they are looking for the advice of a stranger who will forget them immediately after they have stepped out of the car. I can understand the need for a certain anonymity when confessing about your true feelings for your best friend’s husband. Or your controversial thoughts about the European Union. What I do not understand is how those people thoughtlessly drop all of their details on a service worker like myself, expecting some dry, obvious inspirational quote or a common-sense solution to geopolitics they never thought of before. If you ask me, it’s insulting. It’s best to stop topics that are too personal in their tracks. Divert, change topics. I do not need to know the details of every passenger’s life. It takes a lot out of me to pay attention to both their stories and the road.  
Alex was not looking for advice. He wasn’t testing his arguments on me, either, or trying to impress me. Here’s how our conversation went.

  
“Well, now you see why I was late to pick you up. No excuse, of course.”  
“I think it’s fair to say that this traffic is outside of your jurisdiction.” He smiled at me from the backseat.  
“It is, but it isn’t. The weather is force majeure, but if we are not adequately prepared, we are still to blame.”  
“Force majeure,” he repeated to himself. “Acts of God.”  
“Legal terms.”  
“Do you know about tarot cards?”  
“I’m… afraid I do not. What are those, those predict-the-future card decks?”  
“Yes.”  
“Ah. No, I’m sorry. I know what they are, but nothing more.”  
I checked his face in the rearview mirror. He was looking out the window, but not at anything specific. The tiny raindrops sliding down the window, maybe. Minutes passed where we didn’t say a word.

“I drew a bad card.”  
He wanted to talk about this. Get it off of his chest, perhaps. We still had some fifteen minutes to go before we would reach his driveway.  
“Did you?”  
“A bad card in a bad place. And I know I shouldn’t… give it too much weight, you know. I know it’s nothing more than a silly game goth girls play on their attics when they’re fourteen, right?”  
“Probably not.”  
“I know better. But I’ve been thinking about it the entire trip.”  
I swallowed. Fifteen minutes. I could do this. “So, what happened?” I asked.  
“We’ve been playing a festival in Portugal this week,” he began. “In a desert area. It was a very hippie kind of festival. I’m sure you know what I mean. Girls with long hair and a braid here and there. Beards, everywhere you look. All meals are standard vegan. People bringing along their own instruments when they really shouldn’t. Dumb clothes… well, not my style.”  
“I think I know what you mean.”  
“All of the bands do a single gig and it’s not a big deal. We weren’t main stage or anything, meaning we had lots of free time to do whatever. So, we smoked a lot. Yesterday evening… I think it was yesterday evening. Can hardly believe it now that I’m back here, but it really was yesterday. We were lying in the sand somewhere. Hell if I know where. I just trust my bandmates to get me back to my room when the time comes. The moon was really big, absolutely huge. Did you see it, too?”  
“I was on the night shift, so I drove underneath that moon yesterday, yeah.”  
“It was memorable. It was orange when it rose.” He closed his eyes for a moment and sighed. “I’m still not completely back to normal. Probably the weed.”  
“Happens to the best of us.”  
“Yeah.”  
“A good night’s sleep will take care of that.”  
“That’d be nice.”  
Now that I took a closer look, he did look very tired. As if he was drifting in and out of it. He seemed to have lost his concentration and was staring out the window again. It took him a while to continue his story.  
“There were some girls next to us and they offered to do a reading for us. For each of us… Most of the guys got stuff so vague it was like a bloody daily horoscope in the paper. ‘Whether you will succeed is all up to you’,” he imitated the voice of a spaced out girl. “’You have been through some hard times, but you need to have faith that you can turn things around’, that kind of shite. Well, it was my turn. We did three cards. I don’t remember what their positions meant. I drew a card with some swords on it, a hanged guy, and the devil.” He shook his head. “The fucking devil. My mates draw nice, friendly nonsense and I hit the jackpot.”  
I couldn’t take any of it seriously, so I laughed. “And what did the ladies say about your cards?”  
He frowned. “They loved it. A mysterious darkness is the best outcome for them. They were really digging, too.” He brought his hand to his mouth and bit at his nails. “They said: you are in a bad place. A really bad place. Stuck there. The worst part was that they said I was there by choice, partially. That I was holding onto it, this misfortune. Oh, and they flat-out called me dishonest. ‘Dishonesty to others is not great, but dishonesty to yourself is even worse’. And of course, nobody there who could elaborate. I kept asking them, this is the fucking devil, isn’t it? What’s gonna happen? No answer.”  
He threw his hair back and fidgeted around on the backseat, unable to make himself comfortable. “Next, they grabbed some sort of pendulum… a pointed pink stone hanging from a chain. I think they said it was rose quartz. They made me hold it and it started turning around. But it didn’t turn around in the right direction. They’re all sitting around me in a circle, staring at me with big eyes while I feel like an idiot with the stupid thing in my hand. I yell: what? What?! They don’t say a word. It’s like they’re seeing something wrong with my face, or something. I wanted to run away. I actually don’t remember what happened next. My mates tell me they brought me back to our hotel.”  
“Sounds to me like they didn’t have an answer and were deliberately keeping it vague,” I commented.  
“See, that’s what I thought, too. But I’ve had nothing but bad dreams since then. I hope they were fucking dreams.”  
“Also caused by weed, I bet.”  
He chuckled. “Alright, mister Abstainer.”  
“Get some rest and see how you feel in the morning, is what I’d say.”  
  
The next time I checked my mirrors, he was looking at me. The streetlights were sliding over his face, right to left. I checked the front, the side mirrors, then went back to the rear-view mirror. He was still looking at me.  
We were almost there at that point, just a couple of minutes. The roads were quieter here and very dark. I didn’t know how to react. I chose to ignore it. Something about his expression gave me the urge to say something, ask if something was wrong. It also gave off another vibe: one that made me hesitant to open my mouth, that made me feel like I would be intruding on a personal matter if I said something. He doesn’t want to be disturbed, I thought, even though this idea was based on nothing. If it had been a stranger in a cab we were both taking, I would definitely have asked “what’s the matter, mate?”. Him being a customer made things different. The final distance to his house we said nothing. I regularly checked the mirrors and found his eyes each time. He knew that I knew what he was doing, I just didn’t know why. When the front gate came in sight I heard him sigh.

“Here we are,” I said. The line was practically an automatism.  
“I’ll open the gate,” he mumbled and opened his door. The rain had stopped, but the soil had become wet and muddy. Alex hopped around to avoid puddles. The gate slid open slowly. When he jumped back in the car he was shivering.  
“You don’t have a coat?”  
“No. Didn’t need one in Portugal.”  
“Well, this is as close as I can get. The door isn’t far away,” I said when I stopped the car. “And you even have a little rain awning.” I pointed at the entrance of his house, which was completely covered by a temple roof sort of thing.  
His eyes found mine via the mirror, again. This time, he tried to read if I was pulling his leg or not. I winked at him. That at least made him grin, albeit listlessly.  
“Alright. I’ll be off.”  
“Let me just take your luggage to the door.”  
“Sure.”  
I got out of the car and brought his suitcase to the front door. He walked behind me while I ran, unconcerned about the rain immediately soaking his thin shirt.  
“Why can’t you be one of them old-fashioned cabbies who hold umbrellas over their customers?” he asked. It was jest, I was certain of it, but it stung me nonetheless.  
“I’m sorry.”  
“That’s alright. I know you would’ve if you had one.”  
He had found his keys and opened the door. I caught a glimpse of a dark tunnel with a high ceiling- his entrance hall. I wasn’t supposed to take sneak peeks at my customer’s dwellings. I looked the other way.  
“Anything else I can assist you with?”  
He looked me in my eyes. He didn’t answer, leaving me standing there, not knowing what to do. After what felt like a minute he shook his head. “No, it’s okay.”  
“Right. Have a good night, Sir.”  
I believe I heard his weak “Thanks” when I walked away, but his voice was drowned out in the rain. When I was back on the motorway I remembered the cold impression the house had given me. Why did I associate the house with low temperatures, I wondered. It might have something to do with the darkness all around it. All of the lights had been off.


	4. Agreement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The months have passed, and the few interactions Miles has had with his famous client have become faded memories. He gets a strange message from his employer and everything seems to only be getting stranger from there.

I spend most of my days off sleeping in. I'm sure many of you will know how tiring it is to drive for over two hours. With that in mind, I have no doubt that you will be sympathetic to the plight of this humble cabby. 

It was a Thursday and I was off. Thursdays are very busy days for most of the country. A lot of traffic on the road because everyone works; both full-timers and part-timers. That is why I made Thursday my Sunday. I did fuck all on Thursday. I slept and bought my groceries for the rest of the week and that was it. I tended to work longer hours than usual on Wednesdays - I know I shouldn't accept any additional jobs just because I am off the next day, but I guess I am a sucker for that overtime pay - so, when Vince phoned me around eight thirty in the morning on a Thursday, I was pissed.

"Is there something serious going on?"  
"Kane, is that you?"  
"Yes, Vince, this is him. And this had better be an emergency because you just woke him up."  
He was quiet for a moment, which told me all I needed to know. "Not exactly."  
"Come on, man..."  
"I'm sorry, Kane. It's just this. A lady just phoned the office asking for your home address. I told her we have a policy and never give our driver's addresses to clients. But she was persistent; said she had documents for you to sign. I asked, on whose behalf are you calling us? She wouldn't say. Makes you think she'd be more understanding about my privacy rules, wouldn't you agree?"  
"Sure." My groggy mind didn't grasp what he was telling me and I was waiting for a punchline.  
"Do you have any knowledge about contracts you agreed to sign?"  
"No."  
"No documents you are expecting at all?"  
"No."  
"Hm. Okay, then. I'll tell her to send whatever she wants to send to my office."  
"Thanks, Vince."  
"No problem, mate. Sorry I woke you up."

I went back to work on Friday, starting with a few short jobs in the neighbourhood. A guy whose car was at the repair shop and a lady who had to be at the hospital every other morning to get radiation therapy. If I had time, I would pick both of them up to drive them home, too. Vince knew about the lady and always tried to fix the same driver to and from the hospital. There were no other incoming requests, so I decided to go back to the office for a coffee and a sandwich. There was a Tesco right next door. I'd be able to wait around until I could get back to my regular clients. I stretched my legs a bit on the parking lot, egg and ham sandwich in hand. All other drivers were on the road. Vince was on the phone, I could see him through the Venetian blinds. When he saw me walking outside he started gesturing frantically, so I strolled into his office.  
"Of course. Understood," he said to the person on the phone. At the same time, he pointed his finger at an envelope on top of a stack of papers.   
"For me?" I mouthed.  
Vince nodded and continued: "Unfortunately, all of our drivers are currently occupied elsewhere. I expect a driver will be available in about... twenty minutes. Would you able to wait or would you like me to call one of our partners?"   
I picked up the envelope. The address was printed on a sticker. Above the sticker, someone had written: 'ATTN.: MR. KANE'. I raised my eyebrows at Vince, asking if he needed me for anything else, but he waved his hand at me and shooed me out of his office. 

It was good weather out. I went to the park and sat down on a bench. There weren't many people about, just a bunch of schoolkids, some students having a pick nick and a few office workers enjoying their early break. I opened the envelope (practically tore it to pieces) and found two neatly stapled contracts. 

  
I ran into Vince's office, slamming the papers down on his desk. The look in his eyes spelled out to me how utterly offended he was about my demeanor. He finished his call in a perfectly polite manner before he turned to me.  
"What is _up_ with you today?" he puffed. "People are working here."  
"I need your advice," I said. I probably looked serious enough for him to take a look at the papers. "These are the documents that lady was talking about? When you woke me up the other day?"  
He scanned the address. "Looks like it. Yes, it was this company."  
"They are offering me," I lowered my voice, "a whole lot."  
I waited for Vince to reach the information on my proposed salary. A snort and subsequent cough told me that he had found it.  
"Fucking hell."  
"Exactly."  
He turned the page. "The conditions sound reasonable, too."  
"They do."  
"So, what's the problem, chap? Get out of here, find greener pastures. Kiss old Vince goodbye."  
I shook my head. The idea of accepting the proposal made me feel as if there was a heavyweight boxing champion jumping on my chest. "I don't know if I should."  
"What are your doubts?"  
"Well... I don't know."  
Vince looked at me, squinting his eyes. "Something off about this guy?"  
Hearing someone else talk about my new famous client made my heart skip a beat. As if he didn't exist in reality, as if I had been the only person alive who had ever seen him, and that illusion was suddenly shattered. And it made me think. Was there something off about him?   
"Not really, I think. He seems OK. It's all going very fast, that's all."  
"And things will change for you."  
"Well, yeah."  
"Miles," Vince began. "If you'd ask for my advice- and you _are_ asking for my advice- I'd say go for it. The pay is far too good to pass up on the opportunity. Sign their contract and give it an honest try. Because I will keep you on my list and if you ever feel like returning to your old spot, you can do so. No problem. Whenever you want."  
I blinked at him. There was no use denying it; I was touched.  
"That's really kind."  
"Come on, now. Did you really think I would let you go like that? You're happy here, I can tell. You've really grown up since you first showed up here, begging for a job." He shook his head, a nostalgic smile on his face. "See this as a next step. This kind of job is what most of us want. And in your case it just fell in your lap. You shouldn't pass up on it."  
I returned the smile, feeling small.  
"And another tip I can give you. Don't be so modest." He looked at the contract in front of him. "You must've done something right, to impress him like this."

The next day, I signed the contract and returned it. My hands trembled when I pushed it in the postbox and I couldn't remember the last time I had craved a cigarette this badly. I didn't give in.

  
Saturdays were always busy. The main causes are people going places and accidents. Everyone is tired and eager to get some drinks in.   
My cab was full when the call came, on my cell. I didn’t even hear it ringing; the three ladies in the back were being far too loud to hear anything else.  
“But Mel, be serious for a second.”  
“I stopped being serious a long time ago.”  
“Sometime around her fifth prosecco.”  
“For real, though!” One of them pointed at me. “You don’t think he’s cute?”  
An explosion of giggles filled the car to its roof.   
“Oh my god. Shut up, Priti!”  
“I’m sorry about my friends,” Mel leaned over to me from the backseat, once she was done laughing. “You must get this a lot?”  
“Not to this extent.”  
“Ooohhh, she’s really going for it,” the backseat choir chanted.  
“Get out of here! You guys are the worst. The. Worst!” Mel protested, but the big smile and red cheeks made her resistance kind of futile to begin with, especially against Priti and the other one.  
“You’d better hurry up Mel… His missus is calling, look!” Priti burst into laughter, but the drinks had not diminished her perception: somebody was indeed calling me. My cellphone screen lit up, showing a number I had filed under ‘Pinegrove.’ I hadn’t expected an agency like that to call me just before midnight on a Saturday, but who knows, they might have an all-night policy. Or they were outsourced. It was funny to me to realise that they were my new employer and I knew next to nothing about them. In any case, I was occupied and didn’t call back until Gill, Priti and Mel had been safely delivered to their club. They ran off on their glittery heels, cheering merrily at some friends who were already there.   
  


“Pinegrove Luxury Transportation Services, this is Cynthia speaking.”  
“Good evening. This is Kane. You called me some time ago.”  
“Ah, Mr. Kane. Yes, I did. We have received your signed contract at our office. Thank you. We would like to send you some documents. Would the address on your contract be suitable?”  
“Yeah, sure, that would be fine.” It was my home address.   
“Alright, then I will make sure you will get the documents. Good evening, Mr. Kane.”  
“Hold on. What kind of documents are they?”  
“A couple of rules pertaining to the transportation of Mr. Turner. Some preferences he has communicated with us, and we would very much like to attain to.”  
“Ah. I see.”  
“It’s really nothing special. I will get them sent over to you, so you’ll have them this Monday.”  
“Alright, then. Thanks.”  
“Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Kane. Good evening.”

Cynthia had been right; the rules weren’t that special.  
They sent a courier to deliver the documents to me, though; regular post would not do.   
I now had a spare key to Alex’s private residence and knew one of the security codes on his front gate, and under no circumstance was I allowed to share the code with anyone else. That was probably the most interesting piece of information in the documents. I wasn’t allowed to give anyone Alex’s contact details, either. Or to write down his number somewhere. I had to save it in my personal phone and lock it with at least two types of authentication. No problem, there. I already used a code and a lock screen pattern.  
Oh, and I got a new car.  
Vince’s company owns a bunch of nice vehicles, all Mercedes, classy and functional. Pinegrove gave me a Mercedes, as well, but this one was, if you can believe it, brand new and one step above what I was used to. It was more spacious, had a white interior and a lovely dashboard- and all of the extras were included. There wasn’t a single feature I could have added to it. It was all there. It was dropped off by a car dealer at my house. As the contract stated, the car was mine for the duration of my employment relation with Pinegrove. It was fully insured. Taxes and fuel would be reimbursed, as well. Not too shabby. In the meantime, I brought my old Mercedes back to Vince’s carpark. His cars were all company property. I had agreed with him that I would still be on call during days when I didn’t have a specialist job for Alex. I had no clue how much work I would be doing for him. It was reassuring, though; being able to keep my connection to Musgrave. The guys who were there that day wished me good luck.   
“But you’ll come back, won’t you?” Teddy asked. It often happened that drivers returned after having tried their luck as a private chauffeur. Still, it was not very considerate to imply that I’d be back before I’d even started the new job.  
Federico laughed out loud and slapped Teddy on his back. “That’s bad luck, Teddy. Don’t say that!”  
“What, why? I’m just hoping we’ll see him again. It’s real weird to see you leave, Miles.”  
“It’s alright, Teddy. To be honest, I’m hoping to stick around for a bit longer, too.”  
“Afraid of the new?” Federico asked.   
I shrugged. “Maybe a little, yeah. I mean, it’s been great here with you guys.”  
“This is a good place to be,” Paul agreed. He had left for a different company, himself, a couple of years ago, but had returned to Vince’s clutches soon after. “But you’re gonna be fine, kid.”  
“Yeah, you’re gonna do great,” Teddy said. “If any one of us is fit for the job it’s probably you.”  
“Aw, that’s sweet, Teddy,” Federico chuckled. “Are you expecting him to put in a good word for ya?”  
  


When I went back home that day I felt strange. Cut off from the rest of the world. My new S 600 was on my driveway, reflecting the street lights softly, shimmering in the dusk. I had to wonder: did it feel out of place in this most humble of outskirts? A single backlight cost more than what most of my neighbours made in a week. I closed the curtains. There was a nice bottle of white wine on the table, from Vince, with his best wishes. I was in limbo. There was no going back, but apart from my first paycheck there was nothing to look forward to yet, either. Even with two glasses of wine in, it was difficult falling asleep that night.


	5. Life beside the pool

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that he is Alex's private driver, Miles gets to see part of his life, his friends, and his house. And a little bit more.

My first months as a chauffeur were tame. I guess that my shopping sprees and complete new wardrobe were a noteworthy part of them. I felt that my clothes needed to reflect my new position. With my new salary I could afford it. All of the suits, fancy shirts and killer shoes I could have wished for were mine for the taking.  
The most enjoyable moments, to me, were my mate’s reactions whenever they forgot that my days as an ordinary cabby were over.  
“No worries, we’ll all get home okay,” they would say while making a toast with their tenth pint of the evening, “cause our Miles drives a cab.”  
Once the cheering had stopped, Alistair was usually the only person sober enough to counter that. “He’s useless to us now,” he said, “because he answers to one god, only.”  
“Ah, yes, our private chauffeur,” the rest would yell, clinging their pints to mine an additional time.   
“Fancy-pansy,” Eleanor would laugh and start hiccupping.   
“ _Chauffeur_ ,” Kelly tasted the word. “ _Chauffeur._ ”  
“Give ‘em a few weeks and he’ll start speaking French.”  
“I hope she’s cute,” Steven yelled.  
“How many times has he told you, his client’s a guy,” Kelly corrected him.  
“I hope _he’s_ cute.”  
“And I hope you’ll be able to walk home in a minute.”

There was no shortage of fun outings with my friends, those first months. I simply didn’t have many assignments. Alex was out of town often. On my first job, I drove him to London and back. He had to do a radio show, he explained, but he didn’t explain much more about it.   
“What’s it called?” I asked. He waved his hand in a gesture that I suppose was meant to convey indifference.   
“It’s nothing.”  
Whatever it was, it took hours. I waited for him to come back in thirty-minute chunks. I constantly had to drive around a few blocks to make sure I wouldn’t get a ticket for being there. I was secretly hoping I wouldn’t have to drive to London too often.   
When he came back I asked him how it went.   
“’T was fine,” he said, carefully setting his guitar cases on the seats next to him.   
“So what did you play?”  
“Just our basic, regular stuff everyone’s heard before. Radio filler.” He made a face.  
“No interviews?”  
“Interviews, too.”  
I was just guessing. I had no idea what show he had been on, who had been there with him, what he had played or said. I still didn’t ‘know who he was’. Of course, I knew who he was. Just not what I should have known him for. And I hadn’t looked it up, either. A simple google search with the right search words (guitarist, Manchester, BBC radio, live, the date of that day) would have worked and still, I hadn’t tried. For one, I didn’t care- I never cared for my customer’s private life since it was distracting and a taxi driver does not need distraction. And secondly, I had decided that it was for the best. Think about it: my contract forbade me to ever share who I was working for, with anyone. I could still drop hints, but I chose not to. There should never come a time when my friends could reasonably infer who Alex was. The policy would make everything so much easier, I thought. Except for times like these, when I had no idea what to say because I knew nothing. Alex made music. Probably played the guitar. That was all I could say about him.

After the first three months I finally caved and looked him up.   
I still remember when I did: I had just finished a busy week. I had driven him to a run-down studio in the north of Manchester where he had explained his bandmates and friends were. For old time’s sake they would try their hands at writing some new material, like they had used to years ago, is what he told me. After a couple of hours I drove him and three other guys back to his mansion. I drove them into town later that evening and picked them up again around four AM. The next day, around noon, he sent me out to pick up more guests: three girls and a guy. The lot of them spent days in the big house. I had never really seen it get properly used; had never witnessed the pool in function or the coloured lights on the roof terrace shine like an oasis into the night. Alex would pass me some additional addresses to pick up a few others until they had a full-blown house party going on. I think they also had a photographer with them (one lad carried a heavy set of cameras and a tripod). This get-together lasted for three days. The last day, I was called in to get everyone back to their respective homes again. I walked up to the house and saw they were all at the pool; some floating lazily on the water, others seemingly asleep on the long chairs, glistening in the sun. It was August and very warm out. I coughed to get their attention. Only Alex, flat on his tummy on a purple inflatable bed, lowered his sunglasses and saw me standing there.  
“Taxi’s here, guys,” he said.   
I waited beside the pool for everyone to pack their belongings and get dressed. This could take a while since all of them had been swimming.  
“Please, sit,” Alex invited me.   
“Thanks,” I said and sat down on one of the lounging chairs in the shade. Alex paddled towards the side of the pool and climbed out.   
“You look like you could use a refreshment.”  
“I do?”  
“Sure you do. I mean, that suit looks good on you but it ain’t exactly appropriate for the season, now, is it?”  
It was appropriate for my position. But I didn’t complain. My car’s air-conditioning was excellent.   
“Wait, I’ll get you something.” He walked towards the house. Tiny drops of chlorine water slid off his skin and fell on the tiles, leaving a trial of darkened specks all the way to the open kitchen doors. They had already evaporated in the hot sun when he walked back, an ice popsicle in his hand.  
“This one’s for you. Enjoy.”  
It was a white popsicle and it tasted like cola. It had been at least a decade since I’d last had one.   
“Thanks. I used to really like these.”  
“Do you still?”  
“I still do. This one’s my favourite.”  
“I can tell,” he said, his hand lightly brushing my shoulder. “I think I’ll go get one for myself.”  
Together, popsicles in hand, we waited for the guests to come back. He sat down on the chair next to me.  
“You’ve got the right idea, sitting in the shade.”  
“I’m just trying to be careful.”  
“Smart lad.”  
“Maybe. But mostly just prone to get sunburnt.”  
“So am I. As you can see.”  
I peeked at him. He was a lot more tanned than when we had first met, in March, when he had been as pale as any regular Englishman. On his back and on his shoulders a reddish glow was visible, though, especially through my sunglasses. He wasn’t burnt yet, but he wasn’t far off.  
“Best to stay out of the sun for now.”  
“I know, I know. It’s just hard for me.” He grinned, baring his teeth. “No discipline.”  
I listened to the soft breeze as it moved the tree branches surrounding the lawn. If I didn’t move at all I would stay relatively cool.  
“We also have some chilled gin-tonics in the freezer.”  
“I’m driving in a minute.”  
He laughed. “Oh, shit, that’s right.” He wiped beads of sweat off his forehead. “I forget you’re my driver sometimes. Feels like you’re one of my mates.”  
“It’s kind of you to say so.”  
“Well, I think you deserve a couple of days off so you can hang with us sometime.”  
Professionality did not allow me to accept his invitation. Not right away, in any case. I didn’t answer, considering how I should explain myself. The breeze was warmer than it had been a minute ago. I looked over to the mansion. What is taking them so long, I thought, and of course that was the moment when the others stumbled out onto the terrace and the poolside turned into a cacophony of suitcases, backpacks and farewell greetings.   
“I’ll be able to take you home four at a time,” I announced.   
“Tammy, Gina, let’s go together,” one of the guys suggested. “We all live on the same street, practically,” he said to me. We all got in my big Mercedes and I finished the job smoothly. When I came back they were all still at the pool. Alex was back in the sun.   
“Good afternoon, all,” I said. Lazily, they looked up.  
“Ah. There he is,” one of the guys said.  
“Time to get up, Lily.”  
“Urgh. I don’t wanna,” Lily protested.  
“Oi, Miles,” Alex greeted me, lifting his hand in the air.  
“Hey.”  
I took the lead, they followed me to the car. This time, it took longer. Not just because these guys lived far apart (one in the south of greater Manchester, one in the center, and two out of town entirely) but also because they weren’t the sharpest and they gave me a wrong address two times. I say they weren’t the sharpest, but they were probably just exhausted and hungover and the heatwave had made matters worse.   
I had gone back home after the whole ordeal and was just putting the kettle on when Alex called.  
“Could I bother you again today?”  
“Anytime.”  
“Could you take me to town in about… two hours?” He mentioned the name of a hotel. I had been there many times before, mostly for corporate customers who had arranged meetings there, business dinners, that kind of gig.   
  


It was starting to get dark, finally, when I delivered Alex at the hotel. He had spent the whole drive over there drowsing off on the backseat. When I asked him where he wanted me to drop him off I could hardly decipher what he was saying. “The parking lot on the inside” is what he meant. “Park… Parking park. In the back” is what he said. Anyway, I figured it out and watched him go inside. Some doormen made sure he got to the right place. If I had to guess, I would say it was the rooftop bar. I opened the window while I waited, my fellow taxi men parked next to me, also waiting. Music and voices slowly descended from the roof. We breathed in the hot summer air in silence, nodding whenever our eyes met. Us servicemen, escorting, delivering, and waiting on our ladies and lords. While I waited there was some guy rummaging around on the parking lot, bothering a client of one of the drivers. We all got out of our cabs and walked over to help. The sight of all of us together was enough to make him run off. It was good to have that sense of brotherhood between us, no matter who we were of what we looked like- we were all in the same boat, so to speak, and we had to look out for each other. I shook some hands, we shared a couple of jokes. As the hours passed, they left, one by one. When Alex came back down it was four in the morning. One of my colleagues had spotted him before I had. He supported him. This was necessary because he had drunk too much and it wasn’t safe to have him walk on his own. I hurried over to them as soon as I spotted them.  
“I’m sorry, man,” I apologised on Alex’s behalf.  
“Not a problem.”  
“Thank you so much. I’ll take it from here.”  
“Have a good night, mate.”  
“You, too.”

There wasn’t a soul on the road on this weekday. I managed to get Alex home before he would wake back up and get sick on my leather seats. He wouldn’t get out of the car, so I carried him inside. The kitchen doors were still open and I wasn’t completely sure we were the only ones in the house, so I made an extra round once Alex was on his bed with aspirins and glasses of water on his bedstand. Nobody. I closed the doors behind me and left. The pool was the darkest shade of blue and seemed to whisper things to me as I walked by it. I shook my head, trying to lose my fatigue.

Back in my car I felt safe. Much safer than I had felt inside the mansion. It made me worry for a little while; worry for Alex, alone in his king-size bed, nauseous and unable to think- I knew how that felt; and worry for my own sake, a stranger in Alex’s shadowy hallways, so far removed from any normal neighbourhood. If anything would happen here, god forbid, how long would it take before emergency workers would arrive? I knew it was paranoia, I couldn’t even think of a situation here that would require emergency workers and was completely realistic, and I still couldn’t shake the feeling of being isolated and exposed. My heart was pounding in my chest. I switched off the car lights, I wanted to stay hidden.  
Maybe I should stay here, I thought hazily, instead of going back home. Just in case something happens. I had no idea what could possibly happen, but it just didn’t feel right. The trees towered over me, a single lifeform locked up in a metal cage with the Mercedes logo fixed on top of it, dark and high and intimidating in the night. I was so tired. I had been tired on the job before, of course, everyone gets tired on this job, but this was different. I had to get out of there. So I took off, taking a sigh of relief at the first other car on the motorway that I saw. The music on the radio was the only thing that kept me awake. Most of the songs annoyed me when I heard them during the day. I had never been more grateful for their company.

My bed was like a life preserver. Mirroring Alex, I didn’t change clothes nor did I bother with the blankets. This was all that I needed: lying on my back, making myself as tall as possible, stretching gently (I felt my spine crackle in protest), and shutting my eyes.   
To my own surprise, sleep did not come.   
Do you know that feeling you get at night, when you have spent your waking hours doing something unfamiliar to your body, something having to do with speed? Going on a boat, for example, or riding a rollercoaster, could do it for me. A memory of the movement comes back to haunt you, making you relive the turns you took and the heights you dropped. It used to happen to me all the time in the summer holidays when I had spent all of my afternoons at the local pool, and it happened to me that night. It felt as if I were still sitting behind the wheel, as if the streetlights were still passing me in regular intervals. At some point I must have drifted off into a half-dream. Going back to the mansion, travelling from my door all the way to his gate. I knew the route by heart by then. Wherever my mind tried to go, no matter how I made attempts to think of something else, I would float back to his house like a spirit in the night. I didn’t want to pass the doors and go inside the dark corridors, but that was exactly what I did, time and time again.

  
It had been the first time I had wandered through his house. As often as I had seen it, I had never been inside, not even once.   
It had been so dark inside I couldn’t recall much of what I had seen, apart from a few random objects that had stood out in the moonlight. A collection of wine bottles in the hallway, stacked in a wooden rack right next to the entrance. A book, lying face-down on the floor I had almost tripped over. The dark blue carpet on the staircase. A bust I vaguely recognised, a replica of some Roman statue that had been featured in one of my schoolbooks. It had looked like a pale ghost on the landing and had startled me. The medicine cabinet (I had seen too many horror movies and had stubbornly looked past the mirror) I had taken the aspirins from. The faucet. Even the faucet looked and felt like it had cost a fortune.  
Following my own feet, I had somehow arrived in what had to be Alex’s bedroom. In the dark, since I hadn’t found a single light switch. He had been light in my arms, easy to carry. I had carried girls before, girls in similar states, friends and dates alike, and they had always felt terribly frail to me, making me afraid that I would do something that would hurt them, as if I could break them like a tiny teacup. Alex was sturdy enough that my usual concerns were irrelevant. I wouldn’t crush him if I dropped him. And I wouldn’t drop him. My muscle memory, that déjà vu I talked about; it included his weight in my arms.

My house was bathing in peaceful silence when I woke up. My head was a thousand miles away. It must have taken a good while before I realised I had forgotten to set my alarm. When I finally understood what was missing I was out of bed in an instant, checking my phone for new messages in a total panic. It was unwarranted; nobody had tried to contact me.  
A note: forgetting my alarm was a thing that hadn’t happened to me in years. It hadn’t happened to me in all of my days of driving cabs. The same was true for sleeping in my suit. That had never happened to me before.  
I groaned in my headache. I hadn’t had a single drink and I was hungover nonetheless.   
“Fuck,” I whispered to my walls, to my ceiling. “Fucking bloody hell.”  
It was still warm outside. Something in the air told me that it wouldn’t last much longer and I was already looking forward to the thunderstorms rolling my way. I was glad I hadn’t bothered to open my curtains before I had left the house yesterday. Instead of 30 degrees it was about 27 degrees inside. Hoping that nobody, least of all Alex, would call me I threw my clothes on my take-to-the-dry-cleaners-you-lazy-sod-pile and decided to take a bath (yes, my house may be humble but it sure has a bath). I was so dazed I almost stepped into the bath still wearing my watch. It was past eleven, apparently. I hated everything about this morning and I hated everything about the past night.

The hot water was soothing. It calmed my nerves. There was something very different about the water in my old-fashioned tub and any other water. I could stay in my tub for hours if the temperature would have allowed me to do so.  
Slightly concerned that I would fall asleep and drown I decided to put on some music. I have a portable speaker in my bathroom that’s supposed to be resistant to damp atmospheres. So far, so good. I’ve owned it for over a year and it still works. Hanging over the edge of the tub, I started typing out an album title on my phone when I suddenly stopped. For a moment, my fingers hovered in mid-air, in doubt, but slowly but surely typed different search terms than I had decided on.   
None of the song titles sounded familiar to me. I clicked a random one.  
I’m not sure why but I had not expected him to sing. If I had ever stopped to properly think about it I would have been able to guess, but for some reason I never had. It was obviously, unmistakably him; his voice filling my bathroom, hitting the notes and elegantly stretching them, stringing them together, with a confidence that was surprising to me. I had never even heard him hum and yet here he was, switching between a deep, dark timbre to a strained high yelp as if he was being chased by the song, as if he had to hurry to get all of his lines in before he would end up strangled by the music.

I let him sing, let him and his bandmates perform for me in my tiny bathroom, their collective sounds bouncing off the old, weathered tiles. I closed my eyes and meditated on it.

Hearing any song for the first time I usually have trouble distinguishing the lyrics and it was no different now. Even so, I had to admit much of it stood out to me. I looked them up; here are some examples in no particular order:  
  
 _“You weren’t counting on that bullet to fly, like I never expected that look in your eye”  
“Even crooks like me crawl towards the spotlights from time to time”  
“Shatter the moon with that everlasting gloom of yours”  
“Your thousand-yard stare, throwing my chairs and pulling my hair”  
“Proud owner of the ability to put everything in hyperbole, exaggerating and debating until all the card stacks fall”  
“I can’t make out a single star from the prison of your car”  
“You thought I couldn’t tell but I knew damn well you biting on my lip was just a bargaining chip”  
  
_All of these lines I listened to, as he powered through them with a breathless force that left me at a loss for words. I left the speaker on long after I had gotten out of the bath, carrying it with me downstairs until I had listened to three of their studio albums and it was all beginning to sound like one long opera. The themes blended together. Beautiful women, petty crime, references to classic films, casinos. It painted a picture of what I assumed were his thoughts. I wandered inside of them for hours until I was disturbed by an incoming call. It made me run to my speaker and switch it off as fast as I possibly could before I could even think of answering the phone. It turned out to be Steven, one of my mates calling about a birthday gift we still needed to get for Alistair. We agreed to get him tickets for a pretty nice beer-tasting festival.  
“You sounded winded when you answered the phone,” he remarked when the conversation had pretty much concluded and Steven had the confirmation he had needed from me.   
“Oh.”  
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important? Something having to do with avian observations?”  
“What is there to interrupt in the life of a lonely bachelor, hm?”  
“I should have known,” he laughed.   
I realised I was blushing when I hung up. Annoyingly. Steven’s endless insinuations about my dating life got on my nerves sometimes. Anyway, the spell was broken now that I had stopped listening to Alex and his band. The speaker stayed quiet for the rest of the day. There were no further calls, no assignments for me to do. I hung around the house, took a walk around my part of town, went grocery shopping and prepared myself so much chili I had enough to eat for the next three days. All the while, the songs were ringing in my head, some of them real earworms- I could see why Alex and his mates were playing festivals and had millions of listens on their spotify account- and one of them in particular, because it reminded me of our first conversation. I looked up the lyrics and here’s how it went:  
  
 _“Divination implies your quackery was divine  
It was probably the desert, if not the excessive amounts of wine  
Practice your magic tricks, put your spells on me  
I can’t seem to shake these chains nobody else can see  
  
Beelzebub is on my heels  
My days concatenations of ordeals  
I thought that it was dodgy how you spoke of my sins  
I’m running from myself AKA: a race I cannot win”  
  
_

A devastating sleepiness came around ten PM. Deeply grateful, I went back to my bed, where I was treated to long, confusing nightmares about stalking figures in hallways that turned out to be the hallways of Alex’s mansion (even though they looked nothing like the real thing).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where I tried writing Arctic Monkeys lyrics... How did I do?


	6. Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An exploration on the meaning of dreams. Are they a glimpse into a person's psyche or are they no more than humbug?   
> What if you dream about the same things as your passenger?

Close to seventy percent of my assignments for Alex were pre-booked. It was a good feeling to wake up and know what the day would probably have in store for me, especially after all my running around the past week.  
’10:30 appt. at […] recording studios’  
’15:00 regular meeting at […] production offices – ends at 17:30’

I could be as flexible as the job required me to be and yet, I realised more and more often how strongly I preferred to have a fixed schedule. Maybe it had something to do with me being old. I sure felt like a grandpa that morning after my restless dreams. Waking up early, going to bed early- it sounded like an ideal schedule.   
Back on the road I felt energetic, up for whatever the day would bring. Now that I was without passenger I could play any music I wanted to hear (my policy was that I didn’t have any music on when Alex or his associates were in the car with me). I picked what I had been listening to before I had discovered his records and found it to be easy, relaxing entertainment- very different from the strange journey through my client’s public fantasies I had made the day before.   
I started to feel my worry manifest itself the moment Alex’s front gate came into view. All things considered, I had left him alone in an intoxicated state as a total layman in all things medical. He hadn’t looked more drunk than Steven or Ben after any good night out, and I had done my part by taking him home. Taking care of more than that was not one of my responsibilities. Yet, I couldn’t shake the petrifying fear that something bad had happened after I had left him there. I hadn’t heard a peep from him since, doing the math in my head, about thirty hours ago. He was Schrödinger’s client: there was no evidence to the contrary, for all I knew, he was dead.  
  
There was no one on the porch, and there were no lights on in the house, either. Nothing out of the ordinary, since I was early. However, it was with a heavy heart that I rang his bell. My index finger missed the button the first time.   
I stood there, waiting for a sign of life from the intercom. Nothing came and I panicked, pacing up and down the porch, looking through the windows on the ground floor. All was still, except for the trees swinging in the summer breeze and the water in the pool making small watery sounds as it hit the tiles in tiny waves. I was banging on the glass now, noticing the drops of sweat on my back and the painful clasping of my jaws.

“Alex,” I whispered, then mumbled, until I yelled.  
“Hey,” I heard a voice. It came from above. I looked up and to my immense relief saw him there, leaning out of his bedroom window, his hair in a state and nothing on him as far as I could see. “Sorry. I overslept.”  
I was far too happy to not give him an overjoyed grin. “Good morning.”  
He smiled back. “Morning. I’ll be right down.” _  
  
_

I used to think of dreams as some sort of brain debris. Everyone dreams, and if you are lucky enough to remember them, most of the time you cannot make any sense of them. They don’t mean much at all, therefore, disclosing your dreams to somebody else is not a big deal. It helps to remember them better and it’s a fun exercise to try and find meaning where there is none.  
The time I spent as Alex’s chauffeur taught me that I was wrong about dreams. Dreams may appear to be random, cryptic, like a maze without a clear entry and a clear exit- but they are about the most personal experience you can share with another person. It’s the closest thing you can possibly come to reading someone’s mind. Think about it, who would you feel comfortable telling your dreams to? Surely nobody but your closest friends and your significant other. Even if you felt they didn’t have a deeper significance, even if you found them silly. Acquaintances have no business in your dormant mind. It’s embarrassing to both parties. I would say it’s comparable to showing somebody everything you have thrown in the trash bin the whole week, or letting them read rude notes you penned down about your classmates in the diary you kept when you were in school. It’s a useless, self-important and futile kind of pastime.   
All of this theorising as some sort of introduction to this day with Alex: August 19th. A Wednesday.

“I’m sorry, man. I forgot to set an alarm… or I didn’t forget but switched it off instead of putting it on snooze.”  
“That’s okay. I was here early.”  
“It’s odd. I didn’t even sleep that late. I was in bed eleven PM, sharp.” He smiled, at his own behaviour, I reckoned. “And still not rested enough.”  
“It happens. Maybe you just needed all of those hours.”  
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”   
We drove towards the motorway that would take us into the city. He leaned his head to the window as I passed and overtook a couple of slow drivers. The Mercedes had a mean engine, but was so well-built that nothing rattled or shook while driving. I pushed the pedal some more until it felt like we were floating past the traffic, speeding through the morning.   
“Remember when I told you about the tarot cards?”  
His words brought me back to the world inside the car. “I remember.”  
“Did I tell you about the nightmares?”  
“Yes.”  
“They’re back.”  
“What, the nightmares?”  
“Yes, the exact same nightmares. Those wicca girls must have cursed me.” He laughed a bit, hiding his face in his hands. “I woke up two times last night because of them.”  
I wanted to ask him questions. I wanted to know everything about his dreams. I bit my tongue, knowing that I shouldn’t impose myself, shouldn’t intrude in his private life- but I also thought: it’s a dream. It doesn’t mean anything, and if people say that they do mean something, they’re misguided and probably into a lot of other nonsense.   
“What happened?”  
“Let me tell you.” He took a deep breath before he began detailing his nocturnal brainwaves. “Everything is dark around me. I’m in a space and even though I cannot see anything and cannot possibly know how big it is, I know it is absolutely massive, immeasurable. Empty space. I sink through whatever it was I was standing on and I’m in a liquid, some sort of substance that’s not water. Tar, or something. I go under, I sink, until I wake up in my house. Except I didn’t wake up and I’m still dreaming, but at this point I am relieved that I can breathe again. I’m in my hallway in the middle of the night. I get up and walk up the stairs. For some reason I do not turn on any lights. I’m in my bedroom…” He paused, gathering his memories, biting his fingernails.   
“I’m in my bedroom when I suddenly remember I haven’t locked the door. It’s open, I think, wide open. I’m going back, through the corridor, down the stairs, when I see that it’s too late: the door’s open and the devil is standing in my hallway. It doesn’t look like a regular devil or whatever that is supposed to look like. In my dream it’s the drawing from the card. It’s flat. A paper figure with hooves and twister Capricorn horns. It moves towards me, it’s absolutely, definitely, looking for me. I run away, back to my bedroom, but you know how these things go in dreams. I’m going about one step per minute. I find the same paper figure is now in front of me, stepping out of my bedroom. It had been there all along, or something. I can’t move. And that’s when my brain decided to tap out and wake me up. Anyway, that’s my dream. Back in May, it was similar; same intro, with the empty space. I wasn’t home then, lost in my hotel, I think. I’m not sure.”  
He sighed. “Bloody terrible.”  
“I dreamt about your house, too.”  
He looked at me through the mirror. “Did you?”  
“I did. All of the rooms dark, no lights, and just… the knowledge that something was there with me, something I couldn’t see.”  
Alex shivered.  
“Shall I switch the aircon off for a moment?”  
“No, it’s not that. I’m… I’m spooked, that’s what I am.”  
I thought I saw his eyes water, a nearly unnoticeable gleam fogging his pupils. It was gone as quickly as it had come. There was a shadow cast over his face now, worried lines around his mouth were showing. I had to say something.  
“It’s probably nothing. Stress.”  
“Hm-m.”  
“It sticks with you for a day. No longer than that. You’ll have forgotten it tomorrow.”  
“Hm. I hope so.”  
I hesitated. I couldn’t say it and I couldn’t stay quiet.  
“If anything is wrong, you can always tell me.”  
He sighed and closed his eyes. No answer. How to interpret this particular silence, I did not know. I pulled my eyes away and devoted all my attention to the road until we had arrived.  
  
Feeling glad that I would have a couple of hours to myself and the novel I was currently reading (Jack Kerouac’s On the Road), I moved the Mercedes’s comfortable driver’s seat back, took off my shoes and pulled my legs up.   
I knew many guys in my position had subscriptions to video-on-demand services and would spend lost hours streaming TV shows or films. I hadn’t evolved from books and I wasn’t sure what it would take. Maybe I would ask around and get some recommendations. One of these days.   
Huddled up with my book the hours passed. Maybe the inside of a car is the best place to read this story, I thought. I stopped paying attention to my surroundings. They faded to a blur and it almost felt as if the Mercedes was moving, as if I was making the journey through the US, East coast to West coast and back again, and down to Mexico. Sudden knocks near my ear made me jump upright. A ringed hand was ticking on the car window. The adornments let me know the hand was attached to Alex before I could see his face. I threw my book in the glove compartment, wriggled my feet into my shoes and jumped out of the car. For some reason, I didn't want him to know what I was reading. Even if chances were slim a man like Alex had the time to do much reading of any kind and the title of my novel would even ring a bell.  
"Hey! Done already?"  
Immediately after my opening lines had left my mouth I knew something was wrong, that he was far from done, that the meeting or session or whatever business he had had not gone over well. He shook his head and looked the other way. "Could you take me back home?"  
"Of course, of course." I got behind the wheel as he dropped himself on the backseat. I tried my hardest not to look at him too much as I knew it would make him uncomfortable. Not checking to see how an obviously distressed passenger is doing is a challenge but I think I did okay. Neither of us said a word during the drive back, not until the time had come to part ways again.   
I noticed there was a car in the small parking lot next to the front gate I did not recognise. I pointed at it. "Guest of yours?"  
"You're my driver, Kane, or have you promoted yourself to my security now?"  
Whatever familiarity we had going on- his words firmly closed the door behind him. I retreated to my usual taxi driver's distance, said "You are right, Sir, it is none of my business," and went out to open the gate. I delivered him to his front door and got a lackluster wave from him as he walked away from the car. His shoulders were slumped and his entire figure looked miserable. 

My house has a tiny patio where I used to smoke. I once bought some nice second-hand garden furniture from one of my friends for a couple of tenners. As soon as I had changed clothes I decided to grab a pillow and sit down. More or less accidentally I managed to stay there for hours. The devastating heat of the afternoon (probably global warming-induced) of was fading slowly. The overcast, dark patio would not do well in a real estate advertisement but it sure was pleasant on a hot day. I made myself a drink and threw some half-forgotten ice cubes from the freezer in there, for the hell of it. My book was still interesting. I only stopped reading when I fixed myself some dinner around six-thirty. Even then, I only tore my eyes away from the pages when I cut vegetables or had to stir. It was like I was there, sharing that road trip with the guys from the book. If I managed to save up some cash, packed necessities, made the trip to the other side of the pond and got myself a broken-down old heap of crap, I, too, could leave and only come back when I felt like coming back, I mused over my simmering pan of tomato sauce.   
“Maybe it’s time,” I said to myself. “Maybe it’s time.”  
The knowledge that I would actually do it in case an opportunity presented itself sent a rush to my head. But I was old enough to give priority to my boiling pasta and threw some fresh basil into my sauce pan. The meal was all I felt I needed at that moment. When I sat back down and had been chewing on my food for a while I felt my shoulders relax and my jaw unclench. Had I been under this much stress? Apparently so. Trying to take my mental state seriously, as many of my female friends had often advised me, I went over the past few weeks, testing myself. What had made me tense? What had I been doing on days when I hadn’t been able to sleep well? Not much came up. The major thing I could blame it on was my uncertain job situation. My trial period was over but that did not guarantee stability. As Vince’s employee I hadn’t had much to fear. The problem with driving privately was that I could get fired on a whim. All it would take was a bad mood on Alex’s behalf and I could be out of Pinegrove, and his mood hadn’t been the greatest today.   
Oh well. Whatever happened, would come to pass, and I would be fine; I had savings in the bank and wonderful friends who would certainly offer support if I would ever need it. Even though I hadn’t been able to join them for drinks in a while now, I knew that they would be there to welcome me in their midst the moment I would have more time to spare. It would suck if this job didn’t work out, but I would survive. I still had some resilience in me. Much like how a well-made vehicle was equipped with quality springs. And at the very least, I considered myself lucky I wasn’t giving the idea of haunted tarot cards as much weight as Alex was.

I had left my phone on the coffee table. I only noticed it was buzzing when I stepped back inside to put my dishes in the sink.   
"This is Kane, good evening."  
"Where have you been? I've been calling you for a solid five minutes."  
"My sincerest apologies," I started, but he interrupted me.  
"I don't really care about your apologies. Could you pick up Lily for me?"  
"Lily. Yes, sir. Do you have an address?"  
"She'll be waiting at Dane Road station. She'll be there in about half an hour."  
"Alright, sir, no problems. I'll be on my way."  
"Great."  
Remembering his agenda for the following day, I asked him if the scheduled meeting at his agency would still be at ten AM that morning. Silence.  
"Sir?"  
"It's off. It's all off, and by the way, Kane, you are not my PA, either."  
I kept my calm composure, walking upstairs to get my suit back on. "Understood, sir, no meeting tomorrow. Will be with you soon."  
"Yeah. Ta."

Shaking my head, I laid the phone on my nightstand and started dressing up for the second time that day. The arrangement of my summer shorts, flip-flops and thin zebra shirt on and beside the bed was such a tragic sight to behold. It could have been an art installation. I called it "Missed vitamin D". This stuff had gotten serious: I needed a holiday, stat. 

I left my driveway around eight thirty. On the way to the station I gave the agency a ring to check my situation with regards to off days. Obviously, getting days off was more complex than at any regular taxi company. The agency could get plenty of replacement drivers, but that was not the point; their expertise and raison d'être was offering a designated, trusted chauffeur. It would all depend on Alex and his needs, is what they told me, but they promised to look into it and inform me as soon as they had a reasonable expectation of days I would not be needed. Better than nothing. I couldn't be angry when the lady was trying so hard to be helpful.

"Thank you very much for checking and helping me with this," I said.   
I could practically hear her smile on the other end of the line. "No problem at all."  
"By the way," I interjected, "my client told me that he had a meeting tomorrow, but it's been cancelled. I'd like to hear it from you, as well. My schedule doesn't reflect the change."  
"I see. Let me have a look..." Clattering of a keyboard. The poor girl, working on a day like this, after eight. "Yes. The meeting of ten AM was cancelled this afternoon. I will send you the updated schedule right away."

"Great. Thanks for all your help."  
"You're welcome. Have a lovely evening."  
"Thank you! Same to you."  
Ending the call made the contrast with the empty silence I had spent most of my day in even more stark. 

I spotted Lily on the sidewalk, under the large station nameplate. She had a big straw hat on her head. She had been on the lookout; she recognised me and waved at me.

"Hi! Didn't I see you at the pool party?" she asked as she got in the car.  
"Yes, I was there."  
"Wow. I can't believe it," she grinned as she dreamily stroked the seat covering. "I feel like such a VIP."  
"Not a regular occurrence to get chauffeured?"  
"Not at all. My origins are very humble." She gestured to the neighbourhood we passed through. "Born and raised in this part of town." Her eyes gleamed at the scenery as if it was all new to her, even though she must have seen it thousands of times. "Alex is a gentleman to send you out like this. I would have taken the bus. I told him I would, but he insisted."

"Next time, ask him to send me to your house, instead, or let me pick you up at a reception or a wedding. Maybe I can convince him to rent a limo for the occasion."  
She chuckled. “That’ll catch some eyes, for sure.”  
It took me a while before I realised she had lit a cigarette. She had rolled the window down but I hadn’t connected the dots before I smelled it.  
“Hey, I’m sorry, but I have to ask you to put out that cigarette.”  
“Are you serious?”  
“Yes, I am serious.”  
She sighed the deepest sigh I had heard in years and threw the cigarette out the window. “There. Happy?”  
“Very happy. Thank you.”  
“Sorry. I just figured that, with Alex in your car, you’d be used to it.”  
“Well, he never smokes in the car.”  
“Really? Out of character. He always smokes, and heavy stuff, too.”  
That threw me off guard. I didn’t want to pry- well, that wasn’t entirely true, I did want to pry, but it wouldn’t be the sensible thing to do- I simply knew that I couldn’t stop myself. It was very strange because I was aware of it while it happened. Like I was watching a film about my own life instead of being the protagonist.   
I asked, “He does?”  
“Oh, he does. A lot, if you’d ask me. But you know how these things go. He tells himself he’ll be perfectly fine, and let’s face it, he _is_ perfectly fine. Look at him and look at what he makes- living the dream, right?”  
“Yeah.” I grinned and nodded like an idiot. I had to know. I _had_ to know. “What does he use?”  
Lily raised an eyebrow. It made her look like the middle schooler she had been ten years ago, I imagined: a playful explosion of freckles and funny mischief. “I’d start with asking what he doesn’t use.” She took a deep breath and threw her head back. “It’s good for his mind. It keeps his thoughts… free and unrestrained. I know I paint one hundred times better when I use. Imagine what it does to a soul like his? He would never have been able to get where he is without it.”  
“Hm.”  
“When he gets going he never stops,” she said, clearly revering Alex’s image in her head. “There is no place out of his reach. It’s really… he’s one of a kind.”  
Wishing I could somehow force myself to keep my mouth shut and stop asking questions, I asked: “So what are you guys doing tonight?”  
“Oh, we have no plan. We never plan anything specific.” She turned her hands around, over and over, inspecting the curly tattoos on her wrists. “We just meet and see where the energy takes us.” She laughed. “Last time, when there was a full moon, we went moongazing. I drove the car into the forest. Alex lets me drive it when he has had too much to drink. We drove until the path ended. When we came back it was light out and we found the car. It was hanging over a… well, I can’t say it was a cliff, it wasn’t that high up, but the car was hanging from it by its back wheels… I would’ve driven the thing right in a stream. It costs like, eighty thousand.”  
“Sounds like you got lucky.”  
“Yeah. Well, if you have faith…”  
I had reached the side of the woods by then and slowly made a bend towards Alex’s back road. The trees cast pleasant shadows.  
“These woods,” Lily whispered and slid her index finger over the window, “are magical.”  
I could believe that, somehow. “They smell amazing, in any case.”  
“It’s true. Alex tells me he prefers living near the sea and he wants to move.” Her eyes beamed. “He’s lying.”  
I was formulating my next question but never got to ask it. We had arrived at the front gate.  
“Hey, thank you. That was really quick.”  
“I try.”  
Lily stepped out before I had the chance to open the door for her and grabbed her purse. As she did it rattled and clattered.   
Following protocol, I called Alex through the intercom.   
“Yo,” he said.  
“Hey. This is Kane. With Lily.”  
“Alright. Let her through the gate, you don’t have to bring her to the door.”  
“Will do. See you later and have a good night.”  
“Thanks.” It sounded like he was already hanging up before I heard the click. I opened the gate and went back to my Mercedes.  
“Thank you,” Lily smiled and started her walk up the driveway. If I strained my eyes I thought I could make out a small figure standing on the other side of it, coming towards her.


	7. Getaway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alex calls Miles in the middle of the night, begging to take him away from his own house.

I can only assume the two of them stayed at the house together for more than twenty-four hours.  
It was three in the morning when my phone started vibrating and to me, it was the loudest sound in the world. Trying to pick it up I was absolutely blinded by the screen. I dropped it and lost it for a second. It was under my bed. I rolled out of my blanket, on my knees on the cold wooden floor, waving my hand back and forth, collecting strings of dust and cobwebs. I found it eventually and smashed the green button without even looking who it was. At an hour like this it could only be a family emergency, I thought. My heart was out of control and my voice sounded weird, even to myself. Shaken, insecure. Doubting my own name and whether I even existed- I was very tired, after all.  
“Kane?”  
I heard no words- just a sob.  
“Who is there?”  
“Alex,” was the answer. The order of my emotions was as follows: relief that this was work-related, annoyance that I apparently couldn’t even sleep at night without getting work-related calls, and immediately after, and much stronger than the first two emotions: worry. Alex did not sound normal.  
“What’s going on?”  
“You have to get me out of here.”  
“Where are you?”  
Alex let out some sort of frustrated shriek. “In the house.”  
“And you want me to pick you up… now?”  
“Yes, now! Please!”  
“Alex, come on, tell me what happened.”  
No answer, nothing but his frantic breathing. It created an electronic murmur on my end.  
“Would you like me to phone the police?”  
“Ugh! No, it’s nothing like that. Just, come here, please.”  
“If you are in any kind of danger, could you please let me know?”  
“I am. That’s why you have to pick me up now.”  
I tried to gather my thoughts. They fell in my head like a bunch of puzzle pieces. Once they had settled down they formed a clear enough picture.  
“Okay. I’ll be right there. Just hold on, whatever’s going on.”  
“Hurry, please.” He now sounded more desperate than agitated.  
“I’ll do my best to be there quickly.”  
“I’ll wait for you.”  
“See you soon, then.”  
He was whispering, now. “Bye.”

The roads were all but empty. I hoped my tires hadn’t woken up any of my neighbours. I knew at least one of them worked a late shift and many others had small children.  
No traffic. No police. No witnesses to my speeding. It was pretty ridiculous how far I was pushing the engine. The fines would’ve been in the hundreds, if I hadn’t known where the monitors were hidden.  
I shivered; I had forgotten to switch off the air conditioning and I was just in a shirt on a pair of jeans I had blindly dragged out of the closet. I turned it off. The moon seemed to tremble in the sky. You have to understand I was very tired. All things considered, it was amazing how little time it took me to get there.  
I parked and slammed the door behind me. The sound resonated through the trees, quiet, huge and judgmental. I walked over to the security installation when I thought I heard something. It was far too dark to find any clues as to where the sound had come from. I took another step towards the gate when I heard it again. Footsteps. On gravel.

I looked up, through the bars of the gate. “Alex?”  
“Open the gate,” his voice shouted from somewhere.  
Going through the motions, I was on autopilot. The code was etched in my brain, unforgettable. I stood there as the gate slid open, smoothly, whispering stories of success, stacks of money, sex, as it had always done. The floodlights, installed at ten-yard intervals, shone upon Alex as he ran towards me. One moment he was in their bright illumination, the other he disappeared in the dark. His running wasn’t at a steady tempo, nor in a good posture. He ran like he had been running all night. Had he?  
What I saw, what my eyes could distinguish, wasn’t much until he was very nearby. He was barefoot on the gravel. It must have hurt. His hair was all over the place. When I saw his eyes I realised I did not want to know what they had seen, or thought they had seen. I would ask no questions about it. Not now.

He was so out of breath I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I understood it, regardless. I closed the gate behind him.  
“Get me far away from here,” he gasped, looking over his shoulder, back to me, and over his shoulder again. I had never seen him so underdressed before. White shirt, red shorts (or were they swimming trunks?) and a sort of flimsy, black kimono.  
“Where do I need to take you?”  
“What?”  
“Do you have a destination in mind?”  
“I don’t care. Let’s just go.” He tried the door, but I had them all locked. Standard procedure with vehicles used for taxi services. He didn’t like that. “Come on!”  
“Could you please tell me what’s going on with you?”  
He abruptly abandoned his attempts to open the locked door and turned his gaze to me. I looked at his face while he walked in my direction. It was pale as the fog when it falls on the river; his eyes were darker than I had ever seen them. He was picking up the pace and when he collided with me the blow to my chest was so heavy I had to rebalance myself. He laid his hands on my face and pressed his lips to mine. Violently and hard. Everything seemed to shift and fold in on itself- I felt my hands were now on his arms and his mouth was still on mine, and the darkness seemed to have a weight of its own as it dropped down on us- he tasted like liquor, sweet, sugary liquor, amaretto, maybe. Or kahlua. Each breath was deeper than the last and I couldn’t get enough oxygen, no matter how I tried; just vertigo.

I hadn’t been kissed in such a long time. So when he repeated he wanted to leave I didn’t say anything. We stepped into the car. He sat down next to me, on the passenger’s seat, for the first time. I felt I hardly had room in my head to acknowledge that fact. His taste lingered on my lips. My hands moved, independent from me, it seemed, as if they were objects not connected to the rest, and somehow got the car started. He took a long breath when we were out of the woods, into the safe, welcoming streetlights of the motorway. I wanted to look at him. I kept my eyes on the road. Still, I knew very well what the sight of him would do to me. I already knew, so why did I still feel the need to look at him? I couldn’t fight it anymore and gave in, gave him a peek.  
Because of what he had just done, the border he had now crossed, destroyed, in a sense, all of the things about him I had found lovely now stood out even more to me. I had seen all of them, had made notes in my head about the colour of his hair, the elegance of his thin fingers, every single time I had seen him. I had never been brave enough to acknowledge what he did to me, until now. Now that I was really looking I could finally admit to myself just how badly in love I was with him.  
It took me some effort to get over my shyness. Being next to him at this moment was enough tension for me altogether. I just had to ask two more questions, then I would be done for the night. The first:  
"Is Lily still in the house?"  
The look he gave me was bewildered. "What?"  
"Lily. She was with you on Wednesday, is she still at your place?"  
There was a certain delay in his response. Eventually, he answered: "No."  
"She went back home?"  
"Sent her away." He made a shooing gesture.  
"Okay."  
Second: "And where did you want to go?"  
He frowned and covered his eyes like someone suffering a severe headache. "Away from here."  
"I'm afraid I need a destination."  
I decided to help him since he didn't want to answer. A couple of my suggestions, no response: the Plaza, the Townhouse, some other smaller hotels and inns I knew by name; Liverpool, Blackpool, London for all I cared; the sea. I honest to God did not know anymore. He didn't move a single inch when I went over all the places I could think of where he might feel far 'away' enough. I didn't want to give up, so I pained my brain trying to come up with another idea.  
That's when he said: "Can't we go to your house?"  
As if this night couldn't get any more out of control. I finished my overtaking of a lorry truck and moved towards the exit lane. I flicked on my left signal. He had moved his hands away from his face and was now looking at me with big, dark eyes, spelling out to me that he wanted something from me, something he thought I could give. Like the first time I had transported him. After what had just happened I didn't know how to say no to him. If I had still been employed by Vince, just one vehicle in his fleet of drivers, this would have gotten me in big trouble. Pinegrove, on the other hand, had not mentioned any condition relating to this. Why would they? Why would they consider a situation like this when setting up a contract? The entire night felt so far removed from reality that the thought of my employment conditions in relation to it seemed ridiculous; a big joke. It was true, through: I was doing my job. That this job felt different did not mean Pinegrove would never find out, nor did it mean that what I was doing was fine. It was not fine at all. No matter how I looked at it, all my experience as a cab driver screamed at me that A. drivers should never get involved with their clients, ESPECIALLY private drivers, and B. clients should never know too much about their drivers, ESPECIALLY private clients, and C. the fault would always, always lie with the driver, the professional in every scenario I could think of. As long as Alex was in my car I was responsible.  
I checked my mirrors. I told myself I could still turn back. I didn’t mean it. I already knew it wasn’t true.  
"Okay," I said and took the exit.  
Leaving the motorway at this point would mean a detour but we would get there, eventually. Once we were off the motorway we went around the city ring and after about fifteen minutes we were slowly driving through my suburb. The only other people I saw were a group of teenagers (probably students) in the tiny park near my house. All other streets were as quiet as they were dark. There was no breeze and the air seemed to press itself firmly to the ground. It was silent in my car. A kind of silence I was not too familiar with- a silence so full of unspoken words it felt heavier with every minute that passed. Whatever I would say would not suffice; would not be able to lift this weight. Normally, this kind of silence came from my end; this time, it came from both of us and we both felt that. I know that we did. 

He was next to me in an instant when I walked up to my front door. With his eyes shifting left to right he inspected the dark street. In a state like this he would not pay close attention to the state of my house, and that was a relief to me. I have never been the type to keep a meticulously clean household (even though I do try) and I always feel embarrassed when I have visitors over. I am much more comfortable meeting my friends at their place. With Alex it was even worse. I had left the house in disarray. I vividly remembered the dishes in the sink. My cleaning takes place during the weekend or whenever I have time and I hadn't had any time, plus it was Friday morning. Not to mention Alex lived in a fucking mansion. He would be as out of place here as I was at his house.

I looked over to Alex, hesitating as I grabbed my keys. I could not turn back on my decision anymore, not at this point. This doubt was nothing more than postponement, a detour to a fixed destination.

I opened the door and let him rush inside before me. I locked it and followed his agitated footsteps to my living room. He squinted his eyes (red, tired, as if he had been crying) at the lights I switched on and looked at me.  
"What is it?"  
"Oh, nothing," he said, unfocused.

"Are you okay? Is it better now that you are someplace else?"  
He nodded.  
"I locked the door. Two separate locks. I'll go lock the windows now if you'd like me to?"  
"No, no, that's fine."  
"Are you sure?"  
Carefully, he sat down on my couch, on the edge, wiggling his feet, tapping his knees. "Yes, I'm sure."  
"Can I get you anything? Something to drink? Water?" It dawned on me that he still didn’t have anything on his feet. My heart sank, it felt like it was my fault, somehow. “Socks? Slippers?”  
"God, I wish I could sleep," he groaned and pressed his palms to his eyes. Not really an answer.  
"Yeah, well, I'm tired, too."  
He said the following to the floor rather than to me: "Maybe you have a spare bed but I'm telling you right now that it wouldn't work. I get nightmares. I panic and start screaming. I’d be awake all night. Can I sleep in your bed? With you?"  
"I..." 

(I hadn't expected you to be so forward? I am overwhelmed by how fast this is going? I can still feel your lips on mine?)  
"...yes," I said.

It had been at least a year since I had last been in bed with another person. My most recent fling would sometimes stay over for the weekend, that is, before he decided to erase his presence from my life. I couldn't remember the details of that last time- I tried to not linger on it too much and that had worked for me. 

The thing with human contact is this: you forget what it's like. Physically. When I held Alex in my arms that night, my skin felt like it was glowing, as if every single nerve end was now awake after having been inactive for so long. I couldn't think of a single thing to compare it to. Falling asleep seemed impossible when every second was in need of being felt, relished, drunk in; yet I still fell asleep. I suspect even Alex managed to drift off, eventually. 

I woke up around ten in the morning. The things I noticed, in order: 1. it was warm in the room, 2. my arm was asleep, wedged underneath Alex, 3. his breathing was slow and steady, very different from hours earlier. I tried to get my arm back to life and moved it around a bit, carefully. I didn't want to wake him.  
"Hey," Alex's sleepy voice said, in spite of my efforts.  
"Hi."  
He turned around, freeing my arm, and snuggled up against me. Another action of his I had not been adequately prepared for. There had been too many first times in too short of a time-span. Prepared or not, I welcomed him. Of course I did. I had no idea what to say and I was well aware everything would sound dumb. I said something, anyway.  
"Did you sleep well?"  
"I did," his voice sounded muffled, his face pressed to my chest.  
"No nightmares?"  
"No. Don't remind me of them," he chuckled languidly.   
"Sorry."  
His hands were on my back, moving slowly. I felt the pressure of each fingertip. He _had_ to be aware that he was doing things to me. He had to be, right? He showed no sign of it.   
"Want some coffee?" I asked, mainly to try and stop myself from feeling chilly and hot at the same time.   
"If you're making some."  
I got out of bed, but not before I had slowly distanced myself from Alex, taking painstaking care not to make any sudden movements that would hurt him. He rolled to his back, spread his arms wide and smiled.  
"You have a good bed."  
"That’s an interesting compliment."  
"I know."  
I wondered if he was pulling my leg. But there was nothing about his expression giving that idea any weight. I also wondered how I looked to him, fresh out of bed, having been awake half the night, unshaven, unwashed, in my shirt and boxers. It was time to make an escape. I walked out of the room to fix the coffee. And to fix my face.

We had our second kiss after we had had our second cup of coffee. He wasn’t into getting out of bed, so I stayed next to him- although I did notice he had washed up quickly while I had been downstairs, staring at my coffee pot like a dimwit. I could smell my soap, my deodorant on him. He knew his way around in my bathroom after having washed the sand off his feet in my tub before we went to sleep.  
We talked a lot, first. We talked about everything but the night behind us. As if I was the one of us two with the more exciting life, he asked me a lot of questions. I wasn’t used to someone being so interested in things I found mundane. He asked about my house, how long I had lived here. He asked if I had managed to get a good price for it. I explained I had found the property at a convenient time; I would never have been able to get a mortgage a year after the fact.  
“Was your former job paying well?”  
“Well enough. My mortgage is the only debt I have left.”  
“And you did that all by yourself,” he said.  
“Well… Not all by myself.”  
“Parents helped you out a bit?”  
“My, um…” The nagging sense that I was being too personal around him still remained, even now that he was in my bed, right next to me. But there was no fidgeting out of this one. Best to get it out there and out of the way. “My ex lived here for a while. We shared expenses evenly, so he paid a part of the monthly payments during that time…”  
He turned his eyes to me in disbelief. “You’re _out_?”  
I shrugged. It wasn’t something I thought about on a daily basis- the days I had done so were long gone. “Yeah.”  
When there was no reaction from him I studied his face. Was there something strange or unusual about what I had said? To him?  
“You’re not, then?”  
He frowned. The sides of his mouth twitched. I saw it, even though it was very subtle because he tried to stop himself. He looked at the blanket. It was okay. If he didn’t want to tell me, that was fine.  
“I can’t even imagine,” he said, after a long silence, very quietly.  
“Well, everyone’s situation is different.”  
“I wish… I wish I could make you understand.”  
“Try me,” I said and spread my arms demonstratively. “I might understand.”  
He smiled. “Maybe.”  
“I’m serious.” I felt a flash of heat rise to my cheeks as I said it. “I’d really like to know you better. You can tell me anything you want…”  
I was still talking as he put his coffee cup on the nightstand and crawled towards me. He slid his arms around my neck, putting his knees to either of my sides. He pressed his forehead to mine a second, then held back, waiting- for something. For me to stop breathing?  
Now that it was day out, I could get a closer look at him, the closest look I had ever been able to get. His skin was tanned from all those hours next to the pool. I imagined the cool water sliding down his neck, touching the invisible tiny hairs growing there before falling to the ground. Drops kissing his collarbones. The way the muscles on his arms and shoulders formed seamless lines all the way to his elbows. I moved my gaze upwards. The hint of a stubble on his chin. Long lashes hiding the colour of his eyes, keeping secrets. His lips parted, just a little.  
I think I was the one who moved first. It was hard to tell. I couldn’t hold back, so I didn’t- what surprised me is that he didn’t hold back, either. He pressed himself tighter against me every time he went in, moving closer, closer. The sad part of it was this: the moment he opened his mouth for me, I _knew_ , with a biting certainty, that I would always be longing for him if I wouldn’t get to kiss him again. Al. Ways.  
I wrapped my arms around him, lifted him up an inch and threw him flat on his back. We were both out of breath at this point. He smiled at me. It was so obviously an invitation- one that he knew I would never turn down.

He was so beautiful to me back then- it hurts to remember it now. I had never in my life met someone I wanted more than I wanted him. The specific reasons were not clear to me. They are no clearer today. Was it his celebrity- the knowledge that he had a certain level of fame? How devastatingly gorgeous he was to me? The strange conversations we had had; the dreams? The inexplicable night behind us? No explanation was sufficient. They all sounded stupid to me. Call it the fundamental shortcoming of language. When you feel it, you know. That is all I can say.


	8. Stowaway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that Alex has fled his home and has ended up with Miles, the last thing on Miles's mind is letting him go. Alex doesn't like the idea of going back to his house, either.

We had to eventually get out of bed.   
“Good morning,” Alex muttered, lazily waking up again after he had fallen back asleep.   
“I’m afraid it’s no longer morning.”  
“Fuck.”  
“I’m sorry.”  
He had never given me a happier smile than he did there, in between my sheets. “Now we have to _do_ things.”  
“Go places.”  
“Urgh…” he rolled to his other side and demonstratively pushed a pillow to his face.  
“I’ll help you,” I said as I pulled him close to me, the arch of his back to my chest and stomach, in a perfect line. A line I had zero complaints about.  
“What could you possibly do for me?”  
“Hey, now.”  
“Ah, Miles, no! Stop,” he panicked and tried to get away when I poked my index finger in his side. We rolled on my bed some more, as if we hadn’t done enough of that.   
“I think I’m gonna go take a bath. Before we do anything else.”  
“While that is a neat plan,” Alex said, wrapping his arms and legs around me, “I think I have a problem.”  
“Hm?”  
“I have nothing clean to wear.”  
“Ah. That’s true. Want to borrow some of my stuff?”  
“Will I be presentable at all?”  
“You know what I usually wear.”  
“Three-piece suits in thirty-degree weather. No, thank you.”  
“I have plenty of other things.” I got up and showed him my closet. “Anything you like. Try it all on if you want.”  
“Sounds like a challenge.”  
“Don’t wreck my place while I’m in the bathroom, alright?”  
“I can try.”  
“And it’s no problem to go get some of your clothes. At your place.”  
Hearing me say that made him freeze. “No.”  
“Why not?”  
“No, I don’t want to go back there.”  
“Because of the nightmares?” I reached out to him. He let me grab his hand, albeit a bit reluctantly, as he looked the other way, towards the window and the sunlight creeping through my curtain.   
“Because of… just, the whole place.”  
“Well, we’ll have to go back there sometime…”  
“No,” he said, sounding as if a bee was about to sting him. “No.”  
Now, this was a situation with two distinct sides to it. Alex didn’t want to go back to his own house, meaning he preferred camping here, with me, with nothing on him; no toiletries, no outfits, no phone, no wallet; naked and cut off from everything he had. I knew this was a problem. It was a small problem now but it would grow into a bigger problem later. I also believed it couldn’t be healthy or sensible. But hear me out. Would Alex be standing here, right now, if it hadn’t been for his nightmares? If he hadn’t fled from his house and had called me to get him out of there? I wished I could say it wasn’t the reason, at least not the only reason. I couldn’t. In a way, Alex’s paranoia had led him to me- and I wanted him here. If that meant he would wear my clothes from now on, that was a reasonable price for me to pay. This reasoning is what made me say that I got it and we wouldn’t be going back to his mansion.  
“Not until you are ready.”  
His frightened eyes made me regret even suggesting we would go there in the future. “Hey, don’t think about it now. Pick yourself something you like, okay? I’ll be right back.”

When we were outside I thought that everyone we walked past was looking at us. It was the same sensation I experienced when I had been with a new person; the aftermath of my very first kiss, for example: in my mind, everyone could tell what had happened to me by one look at my face. I hadn't expected it, I honestly felt too old for this. Every time I looked at Alex, wearing my clothes and smelling of my shampoo, my heart jumped. It was exhausting, it was embarrassing, it was exhilarating. It made strolling on the sidewalk and pacing through the aisles of my neighbourhood supermarket one of the most exciting dates I had ever been on. 

He didn't want bandages for the scratches on his feet. He asked for cigarettes.   
"Long time since I've bought a pack of those."  
"Aren't you strong in the face of sin?" He gave me a gentle push. "Marlboro please."  
"Lights?"  
"Piss off!"  
He pushed me again, I pushed him back. His fingers clasped at my shirt, the shirt of mine that he had on was looser than I would've worn it- on purpose, without a doubt. The static between us suggested we would not be wearing these outfits for much longer.   
"Let me get this for you, alright?"

He grabbed my hand as soon as we were back inside and the groceries were put away.   
“What’s up with you?”   
He took my other hand to pull me closer. Our fingers intertwined, slowly, and it made me shudder.  
“What do you think?” he asked, the tips of our noses almost touching and his mouth so near I could feel his breath on mine. This was the sweetest torment, the silence before the most anticipated event in my world. His fingers felt the buttons on my shirt, one by one, starting with the last, ending with the first. He drew tiny circles on their sides.

“This looks so, so, so, good on you,” he whispered.  
“Take it off.”  
He looked me in the eyes, an amused smile on his lips. He then devoted himself to the task. One by one, from top to bottom. I wanted to grab him, to lift him up in the air, to carry him to my bed where he belonged- but I was patient. Alex diligently worked for his rewards. I needn’t interrupt him. I closed my eyes when he pressed his lips to my neck. My collarbones. My sternum, hiding my racing heart. I had to wonder how it was keeping up with this. With his fingers tracing my spine and the hints of his tongue on my skin. If this was all a playful bit of banter to him, a game of pushing Miles’s buttons, he deserved an all-time high score.  
Actively making things worse, he held his head slightly to one side and bit his lip. I felt his index fingers prominently hook themselves on my trousers.  
“I’d say it’s your turn, Miles.”  
Fucking hell. I was dying to kiss him. I might take the more conventional approach to it, but I believe I was a decent kisser; I think he liked it. And I loved overpowering him.  
It was all too much. I got to do so much, more than I felt I was entitled to. He let me pull his hair a bit while we made out, let me squeeze his sides, his thighs. He squeaked in my ear when I kissed his neck. Here was the insane thing: he moved along with me. We were a single moving part. I slid my right hand all the way from his shoulder blade to his bum. When I hesitated he grabbed it and gently placed it where he wanted it. This was such a clear way of saying that he was up for it that my left hand copied my right immediately. I smelt my shampoo behind his ear. He had the cutest ears. My thoughts were ridiculous. Off the charts. I wondered, what had I done to deserve this? To fall face first inside this… this parallel universe of delicacies? This hidden garden? This ocean of bliss? I could go on.  
As he kept kissing me, getting hungrier with every bite, it dawned on me that it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now. Whatever had brought him here, I wouldn’t let him go.   
He laughed out loud when I carried him upstairs. Pretending to struggle he kicked his feet (“Oh no, help!”) until I threw him on the bed. I stopped there for a moment, just to look at him, sprawled out on my sheets. It wasn’t a sight I had expected to ever see.  
“Hey,” Alex said, stretching out his hands to me. “Come here.”

  
"Sorry for this, by the way," he muttered. The sun had started its descent already. It shone on my bed and coloured his skin orange and gold. Man, this had been a very unusual day, hadn't it?  
"What for, exactly?"  
"Being dependent on your wallet."  
"Aren't you paying me, in the end?"  
"Well, yeah, but you've earned that for yourself. Not to spend it on me."  
"I can spend it however I like."  
"I'll pay you back."  
"It's nothing I can't miss. You pay me more than I need."  
"I'll pay you back," he repeated.  
"Whenever is fine."

I moved towards him to hold him in my arms. We didn't say anything for quite some time. He stared at my ceiling. It made me wonder what was going on in his head. In a very abrupt movement he twisted himself out of my embrace and got out of bed.  
"I have to make some calls," he said, looking from the door, to me, and back.   
"You can borrow my phone."  
"Do you even have the numbers I need?"  
He sounded annoyed. While this tone of voice was nothing new to me, this was the first time he had used it since he was here with me.   
"I might."  
"My manager?"  
"Well, maybe not-"  
"Then why even suggest it?"  
"...the Pinegrove people probably have a number."  
He looked at me, then sighed. "I'm sorry."  
"That's alright."  
"I can't... think properly."  
"I'm sure you'll be fine." I followed him out of bed and threw on a bathrobe. "I'll go get the phone."  
There was a sense of helplessness to him. A sense of being lost in the world, even as he was standing there, safe in my bedroom. I thought that I would be the one to help him get through all of his issues. I believed that I could be. If running downstairs to get him that phone was the one thing I could help him with I would do it. And that was what I did.

"Here's my contact at Pinegrove." I handed him a business card. He had put my shorts back on in the meantime and had removed the plastic wrap from his pack of Marlboro's.

"Thank you. Can I smoke on your patio?"  
"Be my guest."  
"I thought I already was?"  
"Can I fix you something to eat, by the way?"  
"Well, I would like that. If it’s not too much trouble, of course. Is it really okay?"  
"I'll go and see what I can make us."

He interrupted my fridge raid to ask me for a lighter. The best I could offer him were matches.   
“Thanks,” he mouthed. “No, nothing _dramatic_. I don’t know what you mean by ‘the usual dramatics’…” he walked back to the open doors, barefoot on my wooden floor.   
“I can assure you it’s nothing like that.”  
He took a long drag of the cigarette, kept it in his mouth, savoured it, and breathed out slowly, throwing his head back.  
“Just tell them… Listen to me. Tell them I am on vacation.”  
I continued chopping up some vegetables. I couldn't avoid hearing his conversation altogether.  
"Well, I believe that I can take some off days when I need them. I'm glad you agree... No, I'm not at home at the moment. No. No! It's not... It's not a girl."  
Olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper. I set my oven to pre-heating.  
"I know. Yes, I am well aware. ...and I want the exact same thing as you. ...I cannot say when that will be. Not yet. No. I'm sorry."  
There was nothing left for me to do in the kitchen, except for the occasional stir. I checked my phone. Our whatsapp group was blowing up, as per usual on a Friday evening. I hadn't looked at the conversation in what felt like weeks. They were all coming together at a new pub tonight, apparently.   
‘Won't be able to make it tonight,’ I typed.  
‘Deliberately leaving us guessing of course,’ Rukaiyah responded immediately.  
‘yeah Miles how typical,’ Eleanor chimed in.  
‘your client being a demanding little bitch again I bet?’ Ben said. ‘dump him at one of his bourgeois soirees and get yourself over here where the fun is’.  
Alistair: ‘where the beers are’  
I glanced at Alex, who was still on the phone, on my chair, fumbling with his one free hand as he tried to get another cigarette out of the pack.  
“I don't think the agency needs to know where I am,” I heard him say. “Well, see, this is where we disagree, then.” He jammed my phone between his jaw and his shoulder and lit a match.  
“Chris, you know me, I know myself; we know these things won't last long. Nothing to get worked up about. It's a shame about the booking, yes, of course it is, but the deadline will just need to be extended, I'm sorry. I won't be of any use to you with a burn-out, will I?”  
‘At the very least you need to be at the Hovering Gull tomorrow to make up for it!!’ Kelly said.   
‘I'll see what I can do’, was my answer.  
‘Lads, get off his back, it's clear old Kane does not want to ditch his shiny new lass for us mere peasants’, Steven said.   
I hadn't heard him walk back inside and I dropped a spoon in my pot when Alex wrapped his arms around me from behind.  
“Smells real good in here,” he said, sniffling.  
“It's nothing special. Just so you know.”  
“I don't believe you.”  
“Did you work things out with your agency?”  
“We compromised.” He chuckled. “ _They_ compromised.”

He was ravenous and absolutely devoured what I had made for him.  
“I'm afraid to ask you this,” he grinned at me from the other end of my table, “but do you have any beer?”  
“I'm sure I have a couple of bottles in the fridge. I'll get one for you.”  
“Take one, yourself.”  
So, that is how we ended up here: I on the couch, he on the floor, bottles in our hands and- somehow- unable to stop our conversation for anything that wasn't another beer. 

He talked about touring, where he had been with his band. Venues he had loved and bad experiences with hotels. I told stories about holidays with my friends where we had ended up in hotels equally as awful. Closed receptions. Inedible buffets. Empty pools.  
“I haven't been outside of the country that often,” I said, apologetically, “so my stories won't be as interesting as yours, I’m afraid.”  
“It doesn't make you a less interesting person, if that's your worry,” Alex reassured me, taking a sip. “Touring sounds exciting but it's often the most boring shit I could imagine. I've been at venues where the most fascinating part was the deadly food from the catering service.”  
“Millions of lads are dreaming about doing what you do as we speak.”  
“It's not that glamourous. Look, we're performers: we practice until we can't listen to our own songs anymore; I've taught myself a couple of nice tricks that look cool on stage but it's all superficial. It's just a job. You could do it, too. If you wanted to.”  
“I doubt it.”  
“Oh, come on. Have you ever seen us live?”  
“No, I haven't.”  
He lifted his left eyebrow at that. “You never looked it up?”  
“No.”  
“You know, I want to say that you're a weirdo for not searching for me on youtube or something but I realise it's not weird at all. You're just being professional. I'm weird for expecting that kind of thing from everyone in the first place...”  
I almost confessed that I had listened to his songs. For some reason, I stopped myself before I did.  
“I haven't been very professional these days.”  
“You're gonna be fine. I haven't told them I'm here.”  
I didn't ask my dearest stowaway how long he was planning on hiding here. I didn't even want to consider this thing had an end date. My awkwardness about my house had disappeared. After today, I was sure I wouldn't feel awkward around him, anymore, either. Any trouble I could possibly get myself into seemed light years away from me. Simply impossible to imagine. He was with me. I just didn't care any longer. Now, I know that this attitude was short-sighted and I know it wasn't how a well-adjusted adult would look at it. I'm just asking you to give me a break. I was in love, alright?

We spent the rest of the night huddled around my record player and by the end of it, my loosely organised collection was in total disarray. He wanted to have a look at every single one of them, front, back, and insert booklet. I didn’t mind- this was precisely the kind of night I had collected them for. A summer shower drifted our way and the rain tapped on my windows. My living room transformed into more than it was: a cocoon with room for just the two of us. We went through hours and hours of music. He found the songs he wanted to hear as effortlessly as I would have, myself; he knew exactly on which album he could find them. We moved from my miscellaneous western soundtracks to Americana. From sixties blues to Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac.  
“Miles,” he said at the first beats of ‘Dreams’. He was on my couch, his loveable, firm calves resting on my lap, arms behind his head, eyes shut. “Could you skip this one?”  
“Of course.” The empty beer bottles on my table clinked against each other as I crawled out from underneath him, towards my record player and skipped to ‘Never going back again’.  
“Thanks,” he said, returning his legs to my thighs, leaning his head back. “Heard it a few times too often.”

The rain got noisier around two AM. I listened to the drops tapping my windows. My dazed brain would not let me sleep; when Alex was next to me rest was prohibited. He did not have the same problem. He was curled up in my blankets, his breathing slow and steady. He had been fast asleep almost immediately after sex. Must be nice, I thought to myself, as my thoughts kept swirling in my head and I had no choice but to let them pass through. View them, consider them, let them go; in an endless loop I could not end.  
When I had checked the red numbers on my alarm clock, and again, and again, and again; when it was 03:19 exact, Alex started making noise. What came out of his throat were sounds, not words- even though it sounded as if he desperately wanted to scream something. And he was loud, so loud it made my blood go cold in an instant.   
“Hey. Alex? Hey!”  
He screamed. He kicked his legs out and when I tried to get closer he swung his arms at me. Once I had managed to hold him tightly he stopped. He was gasping for air in a way that was unsettling. Like a drowning person who had only just reached the surface again.

“It's okay, it's okay, it's okay.”  
His shaking turned into a tremble, his gasps settled down and his muscles relaxed.   
“I didn't know where I was,” a very small voice said to me.  
“You're here with me. The doors are locked and we are safe.”  
“I know, I know.”  
I thought I could feel his heart beating against my skin. It was going that fast and heavy.  
“Nightmare?”  
He nodded, his forehead pressed to my chest.  
“The same one you told me about?”  
Another nod.  
“It's gone now, so you don't have to think about it. You can tell me in the morning if you want to. It's best to forget it now.”

“I don't want to.”  
“That's okay.”  
“I thought I was about to die.”  
“You seem very alive to me.”  
It took another five minutes of me stroking his hair and his back. He then fell back asleep. I let him go.

When I turned around and laid my head on my pillow I realised it hurt. He had hit me on my jaw pretty hard.


	9. Twelve days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alex returns to his house to fetch some things. A simple endeavor, but not without its consequences.

The same thing happened every other night that following week. It got me a few bruises. In the morning, he would tell me how sorry he was and I would cover his face with kisses. The dreams subsided. They were less intense every time. At times, he would tell me how far the devil had chased him, how he seemed to be more sluggish with every subsequent dream.   
“Shall we buy some tarot cards for ourselves?” I joked one late afternoon. I had driven the Mercedes to the coast and had purposely avoided the places that I felt were too crowded. I knew he appreciated it. When we had gotten out of the car, he had spread his arms in the air and yelled “Perfect!” at the sea.  
“You know, to see how the stars have changed their positions for you.”  
He was next to me, watching the twentieth ship pass the harbour in the salty sea breeze, my sunglasses on his nose and my flipflops on his feet.   
“Those things are not coming into your house,” he said. “Not if I can help it.”  
“They’re just cards. Laminated paper.”  
“Yeah, sure, but I don’t want anything to do with them.”  
“I wouldn’t know what to do with them, anyway. I’m not a stoned new age bird.”  
“Thank god.”  
He checked our surroundings. There was not a soul around where we were. It was so deserted it made me wonder how that worked: how I could feel much lonelier in places bustling with people and voices and drinks than I felt when it was just me and the elements. Alex moved close to me the way he often did those days. Head on my shoulder, twisting his arm around mine, holding my hand.  
“You’re still afraid somebody’s gonna see us,” I stated the obvious. But someone had to say it.  
“It’s different from your perspective,” he deflected. And maybe that was true. It was what he had always said whenever he would duck and flee and hide in order to prevent others would know he was with me and I had never pushed any further. There just comes a time when that reasoning does not sit well with me anymore.   
“And if I really had been a new age bird?”  
He didn’t answer that. To be honest, I hadn’t expected him to.

Long story short: he never got to meet my friends. I asked him from time to time. Judging from our whatsapp group they were planning all kinds of non-threatening outings: big bars, loud music, lots of drinks. He wouldn’t stand out. Famous or not. I was convinced nobody would bother him, even if they did recognise him. My arguments were fruitless; he wouldn’t go. The only places he would kiss me outside of my rooms were VIP rooms in clubs where he was a regular. Rooftop bars. Exclusive beach clubs. Places where they have special booths for special guests where they can hide their faces from the world.   
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy myself. I fucking loved it. Alex would get hyper after eleven, pulling on my shirt, saying that he wanted to _go somewhere, do something_ \- and off I went, following his directions (often incorrect). He always looked amazing to me, but there was something about coloured lights and nightlife illumination that made him really just- radiate. He made sure the walking distances from our cab (what an experience to be on the receiving end of this service for once!) to our destination were as short as possible and he never looked up so he wouldn’t show his face too much. I, on the other hand, saw the looks that he got, how many people turned around and checked him out. There was no way all of those people knew who he was, not in that short instance he walked by, moved the air. It wasn’t that, or at the very least, it wasn’t just that.   
I don’t even need these drinks, I would think to myself, I don’t need to down them to feel absolutely, totally wasted out of my mind… and then, I’d be drunk because Alex wouldn’t stop pouring champagne in my glass. Unless I'm misremembering what happened those nights I believe there was some wild waltzing in the streets, followed by hiding away in dark parks when we heard people approaching, and his laughter, the only sound in our surroundings.  
This was when he had gotten some of his stuff back, by the way. Because I wasn’t used to paying bills like he was paying after a night like that.

“Let’s make a bet,” he said to me after our second coffee, still in bed. Every day was a Saturday for us. “How many new messages do you think are on my phone by now?”  
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”  
“Biblical proportions, I’m sure.”  
“If you really want to know, we can go and get it. I can go by myself, if you tell me where to find it.”  
“Are you for real?” he asked.  
“Yeah, it’s no problem for me to make the drive over there.”  
He looked at me in a funny way.   
“What?”  
“I’m surprised you’d even suggest it, that’s all.”  
“You said you wanted to check your phone.”  
“No.” He shook his head. “That’s not what I said.”  
“Okay, you mentioned your phone, then.”  
“Yeah… Yeah, I did.” He turned away from me. It was a slight movement and anyone other than me would not have noticed. I did notice.  
“Thought I’d help. I know you don’t like the place.”  
He sighed, very deeply, very demonstratively. “Okay.”  
“Hm? Okay, what?”  
“You can go.”  
It was mind-boggling how he could turn a spontaneous gesture from my side into a favour he was doing me. I accepted, anyway. I asked him to explain where to find his phone when he thought of other things he wanted back: his wallet, his ID, his keys. His directions were long, out of order and jumbled and I was struggling, trying to refer to the outlines of his mansion in mind.  
“You know what? Never mind. I’ll come with you,” he suddenly decided.  
“Are you sure?”  
“Yeah. I guess it’s time, isn’t it?” He got up on his feet and looked around. “How long have I stayed here for?”  
“It’s been twelve days.”  
“Twelve days,” he repeated.   
“Thirteen nights, tonight,” I added.  
“Hey, that’s right.” He reached out to me and pulled me out of bed. “It feels much longer to me, do you know that?”

I drove the familiar route from my house to his.   
“It's starting to get dark earlier, isn't it?” Alex commented. It was around eight in the evening and the setting sun was shining in our faces.   
“We'll be back at my place before nightfall.”  
“Just hurry,” he harped, his fingers in his mouth, biting his nails.  
I was already doing the best I could, and since I was his driver, my best was about the best he could hope for. I raced the motorways like they were tracks and he knew it. 

The house loomed over us as we passed the gate. I feel that even if all of the strange and frightening things that had happened to Alex there had not happened, the house would be an intimidating presence to most people. Call it bad feng shui. I couldn't quite put my finger on why. The get-togethers with Alex's artsy friends masked it well. Even so, I felt lucky I had never had to stay once the laughter had died and the guests had gone home.  
I saw Alex's hands tremble as he opened the door with my spare key. We walked in. He had decided to go in and out as quickly as possible, apparently, since he practically ran through the hallways, up the stairs, and to his bedroom. I hastily followed him. He probably wouldn't like it if I left his side. 

His room was an utter mess. You could hardly see there was a floor underneath all of the heaps of rubbish lying on it. He walked on his own clothes towards his bed stand, grabbed a bag from the floor and shoved a seemingly random collection of items in it. He had his back turned to me and I didn't want to join him in trampling his stuff, so I stood in the doorway. He opened a few drawers and threw more things in the bag. He also took something from underneath his pillow. I didn't catch what it was. He was ready to walk out when he stopped in his tracks and looked back. “Wait,” he whispered to himself and disappeared from sight. He had remembered his closet.   
“Miles, could you lend me a hand in carrying all of this?” he asked, handing me a pile of clean clothes. We took half of Alex's wardrobe to my car that evening.  
“Now you won't have to walk around in my old rags anymore.”  
“I quite like your old rags. I make them work.”  
“Give me some of yours, then.”  
“Oh, honey,” he pushed me on my shoulder. “You could never.”  
“Too small for me, are they?”

We walked through the garden and past the pool. Forgetting Alex's rooms for a moment, everything inside and outside looked crisp and tidy. The pool's water was looking as clean and bright as ever. The lawns were mowed; the flower beds had fresh traces of a rake in them. He has staff, I realised with a small shock. He has people working for him who are still on his payroll, whose jobs do not change if their employer is absent. The knowledge left a strange feeling. I hadn't moved him away from his previous life, at all. He was still living it- albeit in a different environment. He caught my eye when we were on the driveway. There was no sound except for the wind rustling the trees- mixed with the low hum in my ears. The sun was gone. All that was left was an orange glow, turning everything around us an otherworldly colour.   
“What's up?”  
“Oh, nothing.” He looked the other way, towards the pine trees. “Déjà vu, I guess.”  
“I think I have it, too.”  
“I thought so.”  
“Really? How?”  
He just smiled a bit; shook his head. Then turned around to ask me if I had locked the door. I had. We packed the pile of clothes in my trunk, closed the gate and drove back to my place.

I was checking on something I put in the oven when he asked me to help him. In a way, this moment set a series of events in motion that I would never have been able to put a stop to. I told myself that I could have, I might have, but I knew even when I tried to reason with myself that it would have been impossible. I couldn't hide him from the world. Stowaways tend to turn up after a while, don't they? And besides, I wouldn't have wanted to. It wasn't something an adult does to another adult. It was childish of me to even have the fancy of being able to keep him close to me and safe from everything else. I knew this, and I simultaneously did not care. It was no use trying to reason with myself. There was an unfamiliar distance between what I thought when I was alone, and what I thought when the knowledge that Alex was with me sank in. The viewpoints differed so much they could have been separate realities. When he looked in my direction, it was safe to say I could forget about anything not involving him. Any plans, any interests I could pursue without him. It all went straight out of the window. 

“Hey, Miles. Can I borrow your charger? I forgot to bring mine.”  
“Sure. I have a bunch of them in that drawer,” I pointed him in the right direction. “We can buy you a new one tomorrow.”  
“Good plan.” He stuck the charger in a socket and stood next to me, leaning against the sink.   
“How long has that thing been out of battery?”  
“This whole time. It was low when I left. Called you on the last two percent.”  
“Phew. Well, you're gonna be occupied tonight.”  
“Not too occupied,” he replied swiftly, having caught the double meaning to my words.  
“I hope so.”  
His lips curled into a one-sided smile. At the same time, his eyes rolled down to his phone screen. I waited for a response but it did not come, so I turned my attention back to the food. It looked like it was coming along nicely.

The ravenous hunger Alex had shown for my home-made dinners had subsided those days. That day, he was absent-mindedly lifting the fork to his mouth, keeping one eye on his phone. It was so busy buzzing it seemed to be on an endless loop, doing its best to keep up with all the incoming data traffic. I wished he would switch the vibrate function off. I did not vocalise that wish.   
“Sorry, by the way,” Alex said, one hand holding cutlery, the other typing something.  
“That’s okay. You have a lot of catching up to do.”  
“Yeah, it’s crazy. Grand central, you know.”  
“Mr. Popular,” I shook my head. “They all want a piece of you.”  
“I suppose.”  
I felt that with him being occupied by his phone I now had permission to do the same. That was the first dinner we ever spent in the way I imagined half of today’s couples spent their dinners. I read the news. Much had changed, apparently, but I hadn’t noticed anything of it during my Alex-inflicted phone retreat. There was new music, there were a few new book recommendations that sounded interesting. And my friends had send a staggering number of messages. Not just in the group chat, but to me, personally, as well. I ignored a whole bunch sent last week and moved towards what they had sent last Saturday. Well, Sunday, to be accurate.

Alistair: another legendary evening lads. Goodnight  
Steven: Did you all get back home safely?  
Eleanor: yes I thnikshoud be fine  
Kelly: OMG Ellie are you alright??  
Kelly: Pls take two aspirin and down half a gallon   
Steven: Of WATER, please, Eleanor, WATER  
Ben: Got home safely. Now only thirty hours left before work starts again  
Steven: For fuck’s sake Ben don’t start with that shite  
Ben: Happy to spread the misery :)  
Eleanor: Thnx Kelly Im really ok  
Eleanor: Ill have those aspirins now though   
Rukaiyah, about ten hours later: So, next weekend’s still on, right?  
Alistair: I’d say so. I have absolutely nothing going on in my life regardless  
Eleanor: LOL @Alistair  
Rukaiyah: Feeling better Ellie? X  
Eleanor: feelin like a phoenix arisen from the ashes  
Rukaiyah: @Miles So, will you be there this time? Not the Gull but the Arrowhead. We’re thinking to have dinner together beforehand too! We miss you babe!!  
Eleanor: Yes we sure do  
Kelly: Yes!!!  
  
The conversation continued without me chiming in. The appeal to my name remained, an unanswered and unopened letter to my address. I scrolled past Ben’s office rants and some discussions about the best Italian restaurant in town and finally arrived in the present. I checked the private messages I had gotten. One from Steven, keeping me informed about Alistair’s birthday present. He had placed the order last week and it had arrived earlier that day. Rukaiyah and Eleanor had both asked me if I was okay. Rukaiyah immediately after the first time I had declined a night out with them, Eleanor last Thursday.  
I sent them both a message, telling them I was fine, had been busy but that I appreciated them reaching out. I was wondering how they were doing and suddenly missed their company so much I felt like a heavy stone was dropped in my stomach. They replied almost instantly, the same as they always were; Eleanor enthusiastic and funny, Rukaiyah empathetic and sweet.   
Eleanor: Mileseyboyy!!! I thought you were dead!   
Rukaiyah: Hey!! :) Glad to hear from you. Must’ve been a rough couple of weeks?  
I grabbed my phone in both hands and started typing away.   
“Whatcha smiling about?” Alex’s voice disturbed me after a while.  
“Hm?”  
“Who’re you talking to?”  
“My friends.”  
“Oh. Cool.”  
He returned his attention to his own device. I sat there, wondering. Wondering if it really was cool. Wondering if I was reading too much into the tone of his voice. My conclusion was that it was probably nothing. When he started yawning I cleaned up the table and carried him upstairs. He was… even now, I can’t find words lyrical enough to accurately describe how he was. It would take melodramatic metaphors, in an ancient Greece fashion- references to honey, nectar, all the riches in the world- and all it would do was make me look ridiculous. Take it from me that I could not get enough from him. To a fault.


	10. Metaphors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alex feels secure enough to leave Miles's home and get some work done. Returning to their old patterns, with old friends, both of them deal in metaphors.

“I’m thinking of getting back to work.”  
I was still half in a dream. The things of the world and my memories slowly fell in their place but my eyes were having trouble staying open. I looked beside me. Alex was already sitting up, his pillow stacked against the back of my bed.  
“Good morning,” I groaned, making him chuckle.  
“Rise and shine, Kane.”  
“Yeah. I’m trying. What were you saying? Something about work?”  
“I want to get back to work.”  
“Oh.” I pressed my hands to my eyes. Maybe it would help. “That’s great.”  
“It probably is, yeah.”  
“You had a bout of inspiration?”  
“Nah, I was just talking with my mates yesterday and I realised that’s where I need to be. Like, right now. I should be there with them.”  
“You put them into hiatus, I bet?”  
“Yes.” He wiggled his feet underneath the blanket and stared at them.   
“No need to feel bad about it. You just needed some time away from it all, right? I’m sure they understand.”  
“You reckon?” he looked at me with an intensity, a certain sharpness I was not prepared for, especially not this time of the day. “You think they’ll understand when I haven’t the faintest fucking clue what I’ve been doing?”  
That shut me up. He sighed and threw the blanket back, disappearing into the bathroom, suddenly in a hurry.

He was friendly enough when he emerged from the bath, a whirlwind of sweet shampoo fragrance in tow. He had on a particularly adorable shirt (the print was just tiny hearts if you looked closely) and a pair of trousers that looked insanely good on him. I remembered I had taken covert looks at him wearing them way back when, before all of this happened. Before it had sunk in that I was crazy attracted to him. I realised I had not gotten used to his presence here, at all. It was better, even more intoxicating now. Do you think there are things that keep on spinning, faster and faster? As far as I know, machines that keep going without additional force do not exist.   
“Got a job for you,” he smiled, his phone in his hand. “Let’s go when you’re ready.” He must have noticed the dumbstruck look on my face. “What’s up?”  
“You just look good today.”  
“Well,” his eyes gleamed, “so do you, in fact.”  
“So, for this job you mentioned, would you like me to dress casual or business?”  
“Wear a suit,” he said.   
“Business it is. This one?”  
“Yes, please. Fuck,” he mumbled when I buttoned my shirt. “Did you know I wanted to take that thing off of you the first time I saw you in it?”  
“No, I did not.”  
“Well, you know now.”

He phoned me in the late afternoon, sounding excited and energetic.  
“Hey, Miles. I'm sorry, I'm afraid it's going to take a little while longer today.”  
“Okay.”  
“It's just that... the flow is really good right now. You know? Like it’s thrown in our laps without any effort from us.”  
“Sure. You’re entertaining the muses,” I joked.  
“Exactly.”  
“And if you don't continue working now you might miss out on some good stuff. Of course, I get that. No problem. Just call me when I need to come and pick you up.”  
“Thank you for understanding.” His voice became softer when he told me he couldn't wait to see me again and that all of this was rather two-sided to him. I said I missed him. The both of us fell silent for a short moment.  
“Good luck tonight.”  
“Thank you. You make me happy.”  
He had said it very quickly and he had ended the call before I had the chance to react. That was okay. Feeling like my good mood was indestructible, I huddled up on my couch and opened my book. I was about halfway through it and was dreading the end of the journey even as I was reading it. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to disappear off the face of the earth? I knew it was no longer as possible a choice as it must have been in the fifties. I wished it still was. I saw visions of the Mexico desert, the fields we could work in and the tent we could live in, and laughed at the ridiculousness of the very idea. Besides, the sun would scorch our English skin right off.   
  
He called around ten thirty. He must have spotted me parking the car because when I walked up to the front entrance of the studio he ran out the doors and practically into me, wrapping his arms around my neck.   
“Hey,” I greeted him.  
“Hey.”  
“So, things went well, eh?”  
“Yeah,” he said, his cheek pressed to mine. “It was so much more fun than I had expected.”  
“Good to be back?”  
“Yeah, def.”  
I was proud of him. Not just because of him getting back into work. The fact of the matter was that he did not let go of my hand when we walked to the Mercedes. We strolled around the parking lot like we were a real couple, or something. It made me realise that this was another ‘first’ for us. There still were more ‘firsts’ for us, in the future. There was still so much left to do. The evening air was cool, cooler than it had been the past few days and I was grateful for it. We rolled down the windows when we drove down my neighbourhood.

The night air was all around us, drifting through my open windows, gently pulling at my curtains. The metal rings they hung from made small jingling noises when they hit the rod.  
“Before I forget,” Alex began, lying on his side, resting his head on his palm, “the guys are planning a little retreat for us.”  
“You mean like a sort of getaway with the four of you?”  
“Yeah, something like that. We won't be alone, though. Management is sending us some editing staff. And our production assistant is joining us, too.”  
“Sounds pretty professional.”  
“That's because we are professionals,” he laughed. “Need I remind you? Our last tour was completely sold out and we did two festivals this year.”  
“I am aware.” I lazily drew a line with my finger from his shoulder to his navel. There was a sweet scent in the air. The last flowers of the year were in bloom. The neighbours had a big evening primrose wrapped all around the fence between my garden and theirs. On nights like this, the smell of its nectar was in every garden, and every house.  
“They have planned this retreat for next Monday.”  
“That's quick, isn't it?”  
“They had it planned already. Before I... you know.”  
“And they didn't feel like canceling the arrangements.”  
“No. I suppose they figured... usually, when I get these spells of inactivity they don't last. And they got a good deal on the cancellation policy, I bet.”

Spells of inactivity. Was that what he called them? I chose not to delve into the concept, chose not to ask questions. Not tonight. Not when he was next to me, almost glowing in the bright light of the moon mixed with the faint yellow of the streetlights.   
“Where is it?”  
“Somewhere in Wales, last I heard. Near the coast. The place is supposed to have some good, advanced equipment. But I've never been, so I don't know, really.”  
“Hm. Should be great weather there this time of year. Good to escape the city for a bit.”  
“Forecasts are good,” he agreed, and rolled to his back.  
“Do you need transportation?”  
“Just to the studio. They've arranged a bus that will pick us up from there.”  
“Okay.”  
“So, I'll be away for two weeks. Seventh to the twentieth.”  
“The twentieth. Got it.”  
He locked his eyes to mine. “Miles?”  
“What's up?”  
“This is all very abrupt. I should have told you earlier. I'm sorry.”  
“Oh, that's okay.”  
“Are you sure? I mean, I can imagine you sort of got used to me being here.”  
“You are asking if I'm going to miss you unbearably,” I corrected him with a smile. He didn't respond to that; maybe he had expected me to take it more seriously. “I'm gonna be fine,” I added. “I'm also very used to living on my own.”  
“So was I,” he said, “until that changed.”

I delivered him at the studio that Monday, September 7th. Our goodbyes were quick and distant with Alex's band mates and other colleagues standing there, waiting for him. We weren't the last to arrive; there were two guys near the entrance whom I recognised from before. I wasn't sure since I had never looked up any of his band's videos on youtube, but judging from their outfits (slick, smooth, tight; total bombshells) it was safe to assume that they shared stages with him. The garments weren’t too eye-catching or shiny or anything like that on their own. To a trained eye, however, the high price tag was evident.

“Have a good two weeks, then,” I said.  
“Thank you.” He looked over his shoulder and hesitated, the door open and one foot hovering above the tarmac. The hesitation only lasted a moment, invisible to anyone who hadn't spent weeks in the same house with him. He stepped out of the car. “See you on the twentieth.”

Knowing that I would be alone on a Friday night for the first time in weeks I had gladly accepted my friends' most recent invitation. It would be at the Hovering Gull tonight, as it had been so many other nights: our favourite Friday spot. It had football on big screens, a relatively calm crowd and a larger selection of beers than any old pub. I took the bus into town. Whatever would happen tonight, I sure as fuck was drinking, and the prospect made me grin to myself like a maniac. Hoping I would at least make it until midnight without dozing off I hopped out of the bus. I enjoyed the quiet minutes I had left with myself and my reflection in the shop windows until I walked inside and was greeted by what felt like a cheering wave in a football stadium.  
“Miles!” Eleanor and Rukaiyah shouted and ran towards me, dragging me to the rest of the group.   
“The lost boy,” Alistair declared and directed Ben to the bar. “Go get this man a drink. He's been surviving in the wilderness for weeks.”  
“Good to see you, mate,” Ben grinned as he hurried past me, towards the bar.  
“So, what have you been doing all of this time?” Steven asked.  
“You know me. I've been busy.”  
“What, you've been in bed with this guy for what, two weeks? And we still don't even know his name. Tell us all about him! How can I make puns about him when I don't know the poor lad's name?”  
“Hey,” Kelly raised her eyebrows at him, “you’re not automatically assuming it’s a girl, this time? That's new.”  
“You'd be amazed at what I can do when I'm not inebriated.”  
“Are you trying to tell us you're not inebriated, then?” I asked. I was surprised at my own wit directly after finding out that my friends were, apparently, all already well aware that there was some kind of romance going on in my life. I should have denied Steven’s insinuations when I had still had the chance. I guessed it was too late now. Best to not attract too much attention to it.  
“Good one, good observation.”  
“He'll tell us when he wants to tell us, alright Steve?” Kelly sent me a smile. “Not that we're not curious, of course.”

We moved to one of the larger tables after a bunch of old geezers had left the building for the night, and we didn’t really touch on the subject again. Instead, I was the one asking questions, since I had missed all the latest news. This ‘news’ ranged from Ben’s ever-awful coworkers and their latest foolery to the little plants Eleanor had bought for her balcony.

At the end of the evening it was just me, Rukaiyah and Eleanor. This often happened: Ben needed his sleep, Kelly didn't want to be home too late and Steven was content following her, and Alistair wasn't afraid to miss out on anything. Those days seemed to be past him.

Rukaiyah and Eleanor had been friends since primary school and it showed. It was hard to keep up with them at times. They had so many shared interests, common experiences and inside jokes that they could go for hours and every word they said would just be total gibberish to anyone else. I’d try to give an example but I can’t; I don’t understand what they talk about and that makes it very difficult to remember. This dynamic changed when it was just the three of us.   
“Miles, where did you find your boyfriend?” Eleanor asked me at one point. At this point I was too tired and too drunk to continue playing charades. It was no use trying to hide it from these ladies who had known me for years, who had been by my side through, how many? Must have been at least three different relationships. It was fine; them knowing there was a guy would not affect Alex or his privacy in any way, as long as I kept my cards to myself. I told myself I wouldn’t give anything away but I wasn’t going to deny anything, either.  
“He's been very secretive about him,” Rukaiyah said. “I'm starting to doubt whether this man is even real.”  
“Why do you ask? Are you looking for one? I thought you had enough of men?”  
“I sure do,” Eleanor smiled, sipping from her wine. “I just... I don’t have the energy. I don’t know how you manage. But I’m curious.”  
“So, no joking around. Is he real?” Rukaiyah asked, her eyes piercing mine.  
“He is very real. The problem is that I can't tell you anything about him.”  
“Tell me how he looks.”  
“I can't tell you.”  
“How old is he?”  
“I can't tell you.”  
“Colour of his eyes?”  
 _Brown_ , I thought as Alex’s face flashed before my eyes. “I can’t tell you,” I answered.  
“Not even that?”  
“I’m sorry.”  
“Favourite music?”  
“I think I can shed some light on that. He likes guitar rock. Strong rhythm section, very tight. Kind of alternative. Both British and American. Things that have a cowboy feel, a desert vibe, you know?”  
The girls cast each other a look.  
“No, I don’t, really,” Eleanor chuckled.   
“So you listen to a lot of music together, then?” Rukaiyah gathered. “Sounds like your type, alright.”  
“I guess so.”  
“You’re blushing.”  
“Oh, God,” I groaned and hid my face in my hands.

“Sorry, babe,” Rukaiyah laughed. “Would you like another drink?”  
“Yes, I would,” I sighed.  
“I'll go get you one.”

“I'm glad it's working out for you,” Eleanor said. “You look so much happier.”  
“That's good to hear. Thank you.”  
“I really think you deserve this. Especially with the past year behind you.”  
She was so sweet. Rukaiyah came back with a crisp glass of wine and we toasted again, just because we could.   
“So, how long have you been together?”  
Good question. If it were up to me, I would have started counting from the night he had first kissed me. Alex was unlikely to see it that way. In fact, now that I was forced to think about it, he was unlikely to even see us as being 'together' at all, even now. He was staying at my place, we shared everything, we were undeniably in love- but I had nothing, no promises, no definition of what we had. What I had was a bunch of his clothes in my closets and his toiletries in my bathroom.   
In other words, he was still keeping up the facade that I was just his driver, one of his employees, so to speak. And not for the first time, I wondered why I had to gather what he had decided to show and what to hide as it happened; why he didn't talk to me about it.   
“I'm not so sure,” was all I could answer.  
“How long have you known each other, then?”  
“I, um... I can't say that, either.”  
“Not ready for the 'meet the guys' moment, then, I assume.”  
“No, he isn’t.”  
“Shame,” Rukaiyah said. And she was right.  
“What is it with this guy, huh?” Eleanor joked in Rukaiyah's direction. “Feeling intimidated by your frankly amazing group of mates, is he?”  
“I would be, too, if I wasn't part of us,” I said.  
“Just make sure he knows he's super welcome,” Rukaiyah said. “He has nothing to worry about, we're not a bunch of uncultured, narrow-minded hooligans.”  
“Except for Alistair.”  
“Yeah, except for Alistair, of course.”  
“It's probably different because you're a guy,” Eleanor said slowly, still chewing on her thoughts as she worded them, “and there's an extra barrier there. But I remember some of my exes who never wanted to come along to the Gull. Turned out to be just fuckboys.”  
“Maybe that's just the type of lads coming after you, Ellie.”  
“Unfortunately.” She sighed, resting her chin on her hand. She looked tired, hell, we all looked tired. “It felt like investing stuff and never getting anything out of it, you know?”  
Rukaiyah laughed, throwing a coaster in her direction. “Here comes tipsy Eleanor with her profound metaphors.”  
“Okay, I'll make it super profound especially for you: like throwing hard-earned coins in a well and never getting any of your wishes granted.”  
“Oooh, I like that one.”  
“So do I. But you know the kind of boy... drops everything and is with you in an instant when you call him at night, but he's never there when it involves any sort of activity _outside_ of the bedroom.”  
“I sure do,” I said, shaking my head. “I can tell you the same thing is true for many ladies I have known. Bunch of cowards.”  
“Yes. They are.”  
“I have a metaphor for you, Ellie. And you won't believe it, but this is something I actually said to a guy like that.”  
“Which one?” Eleanor asked with big, green eyes. Rukaiyah waved her hand.  
“I don't think you'd know which one. This is one of those tinder dates I had a couple of years ago, back when that was new for me.”  
“Ah, okay.”  
“Listen to me being great. This is what happened. This guy had stayed over for the night, at my place, for the fifth time I believe it was, and everything was good. I was texting with this guy all day. So when he had left I asked, I _dared_ ask, why don't we go out to dinner sometime? Have a drink? Go for a walk? Go to a salsa dance workshop for all I care? And he just didn't answer. Completely shut down. He was silent for hours. And all I had done was invite him to spend more time with me, because I liked him. When he finally answered he said he didn't want to be tied down. As if I had bloody proposed to him.” She rolled her eyes.   
“What a loser,” Ellie said.  
“Indeed he was. It's remarkable how quickly their appeal drops when they act like that. A foolproof way to kill any attraction that was left...”  
“So what did you say?”  
“Ah. I said: ‘If you’re too scared to be seen with me in public I don't know why you're with me at all. We can be open, we can give each other space, I'm fine with all of that. But if all you are going to throw me are breadcrumbs, you'd better make sure they're gourmet breadcrumbs.’ And so, he blocked me. Oh yeah, the last thing he said was that I'd be sorry but I really, really wasn't.”

We spoke on the phone exactly twice during his stay at the Welsh coast.   
The first time was in the afternoon of the second day, when he had just left. Wanting to ask how his drive had been and what his accommodation was like (and wanting to hear his voice again) I dialed his number. When he finally picked up his voice was subdued.  
“Hey.”  
“Hey! Are you free to talk now?”  
“No. Not right now. Sorry.”  
“Okay, just message me when you can, okay?”  
“Sure, I'll let you know. Bye.” He hung up.  
“Phew, someone is cranky,” I mumbled. “Or maybe he’s just a busy, busy, bee,” I hummed, correcting my own thoughts. I remembered how Alex had told me I had a ‘good singing voice’ once, when I had absent-mindedly been singing a few lines during my shaving and grooming routine. I don’t know which songs they were. Could have been anything from the old Beatles to our lady Lana del Rey.  
“I bet you say that to _all_ the girls,” I replied.  
“No, I don’t. Hardly ever,” had been his response.   
Yeah right. Quit feeding this poor lad grandiose ideas of stage lights and creative freedom, please! I had cars to drive and seats to vacuum.  
I slid my phone back in my pocket. I had just returned home and had stacked my cabinets with groceries and snacks. After the cleaning would be done for the week I had nothing else left planned and I was trying to come up with things to do. Calling Alex had been the first thing on my list. My attempt had left a sour taste and I didn't feel like doing anything productive anymore. In the end, I booted up my playstation and watched some football reruns.  
  


The second time I called him was at night. Since I was relieved from any work I was having a sort of vacation at my own home. I slept late. I lived my day-to-day life the way I had done when I had been a teenager in school. I was even looking into some courses I had been wanting to do for ages. The nearby schools had some interesting programs and the exciting thing was that I would probably be able to afford going. Now that I had some money for the first time in my life, I figured I needed to make the most out of it. This taxi gig wouldn't last forever, at least, not if I could help it.

He had started replying to my latest message around eleven. My phone buzzed, I saw his name on my screen, my heart jumped. I really was back to being a teenager.   
‘Can I call you?’ I asked. As a reply, he called me.  
This call was a day and night difference from the last time.  
“Miles,” he said. I could hear his smile. It was contagious.  
“Alex.”  
“What's up? Everything as it should be back home?”  
“Same as it's ever been.”  
“Make sure it's clean when I come back, eh? And iron my shirts.”  
“Would you like me to make you a Sunday roast on your return, dear?”  
“Mm. With that gravy I like so much. Licking my fingers as we speak.”  
“In all seriousness, you know I can do that, right?”  
Alex laughed out loud. “That's okay, babe. I'd feel guilty as hell if you did.”  
“But you contribute so much to the household.”  
“Yeah. I eat all your food.”  
“Every soul on the earth has its own, unique talents. And I believe in a meritocracy.”  
“Alright, Kane.”  
“Sorry, Turner. Tell me about your week.”  
“It's been good. Altogether a very positive experience.”  
“How's the hotel?”  
“It's good. It's got this nice ocean view. They have muffins at the breakfast buffet. You know how some hotels have them little fake supermarket ones, with blueberries? Smell good, but taste kinda stale? These are different, though. Fresh. Not just reheated in the oven but actually baked every morning.”  
“Careful with those. They're tricky.”  
“No. I'm gonna treat myself while I'm here.”  
“But you'll be there for another week.”  
“What are you gonna do?” he asked. “Come here and hide them from me?”  
“Shall I?”  
I heard him sigh at the other end. “Would be nice, wouldn't it?”  
An image of us in a comfortable hotel room with a spectacular view of the sea. Windows as tall as the ceiling. Beers on the balcony. The sunset in his eyes, his shadow on the walls. “Definitely.”  
“I'm sorry you couldn't be here.”  
“So am I, actually.”  
“But we wouldn't have much time together. I'm pretty much working from ten AM to ten PM.”  
“Maybe we can plan something for next time. With the two of us?”  
He just chuckled at that. “Do you miss me, or something?”  
“Yes.”  
“I miss you, too.”  
“You want me to describe how it feels?”  
“Oh. Now I'm curious.”  
“I feel like I have been thrown into a pool filled to the brim with a very good, very strong whisky, and after taking a single sip, immediately pulled out again.”  
“Jesus. You drink too much.”

“Pretty good metaphor, though, right?”  
“It’s not bad.”  
“We can’t all be a genius wordsmith magician, like you.”  
“You can stop now. I think I’d best go to bed.”  
“Then I wish you a good night.”  
He was silent, for a moment. I sensed that he wasn’t done, so I waited.   
“I miss your house,” is what he said. “Sleeping next to you. I miss it. More than I had expected.”  
I closed my eyes. When I concentrated, I could summon his presence- a reflection of Alex, the one that lived within my thoughts. It was a weak presence, a transparent vision. Weak as it was, I sometimes almost felt him as if he was really with me.  
“I’ll wait for you.”  
“I miss you.”  
“I miss you, too.”  
He disconnected. In an instant, I missed him so badly it felt as if a hand was clasping on my throat. And I could imagine him there, far away, how he was: my sweet, shy Alex with a head full of doubt.


	11. The terrible guest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Alex's time away, Miles is treated to radio silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning! This chapter contains drug abuse

At the time of that phone call from his hotel bed, what we had said felt like light-hearted banter. Sentimental tripe. Stuff people tell each other when they’re smitten with one another. It was meaningful in the sense that it was something I wanted to do with the man I loved, no more.   
It felt like walking a tightrope those days, when we danced around truth and half-truths, circling closer and closer to who we really were and what we really wanted to communicate. In my experience, this is a fairly normal thing in any new relationship. Call it a phase. An exploration. We took our time. I liked taking my time with him. I wanted to make a slow dive. To me, every aspect of Alex was important and worth investigating, worth admiring.   
In the light of what I know now, it feels very different. And maybe it’s just me. Maybe I _want_ to see meaning where there is none; don’t we all? I know that I want to, at least when it comes to Alex. I thought I had more time.

The twentieth of September came. Alex did not.  
I texted- he didn’t reply. This was nothing out of the ordinary. Alex wasn’t really a texting kind of guy and I knew he was busy and always with his friends, friends who were unaware I even existed. The hurt I felt about that simple fact was always there, somewhere, put away in a place I told myself I would go back to, when the time was right. It was subdued. Especially on that day, when Alex was the only thing I could think about and every object around me seemed to buzz with anticipation. I promised myself, the same way I had done many times before, that I would talk to him about it. Later.  
After I had had some breakfast, I tried calling him. He didn’t pick up. This was fine, I still had plenty of time. He hadn’t told me what time they would come back to town. It could be late at night for all I knew. He would call me when he needed me.  
Not knowing what to do with myself and the large supply of built-up energy in my body, I stepped out of the door. Armed with my earbuds and Spotify, I had no doubt I’d be able to stand the futile hours ahead of me. And I have to say, I had quite the nice walk. I left the neighbourhood and wandered over to places I usually never set foot in. I found a park I hadn’t even known was there, as well as a very beautiful and serene graveyard just hiding around a corner. The sun was out and even though it was September, I could’ve mistaken it for August, easily. I sat down on a bench and let the sunlight warm my face.   
I had lunch at a café in town, I made dinner in my kitchen. I called Alex again, wanting to know if I should make enough for the two of us, but there still was no answer. I made enough for at least a family of four, just in case.  
When I had waited for two more hours I finally started to get worried. Was there anyone else I could call? I soon realised that Pinegrove was the only number I could contact for information.   
When I called they told me that the bus had delivered the whole team at the studio it had picked them up from around noon that day. They couldn’t tell me any more about Alex’s whereabouts than I knew, myself. Alex had insisted that no one knew about what had happened with him and me and had made sure no one knew that he had stayed here for weeks, and this was the consequence. I was nothing to the people he was with (whoever they were) and even if I could have called them now, me inquiring about him wouldn’t align with the stories he had told them. Why would I care where he was? I was his chauffeur.  
  
It was a shame I had made quite a nice dinner. It was a red curry with some fresh naan I had bought at the nearest corner store. I sat at my dinner table looking at it. I had re-heated it because I believed I still needed to have something in my stomach. Since I needed to convince myself that there really wasn’t any reason to be upset. No reason to disrupt my daily necessities.  
I looked at the steam twisting around itself as it rose from my plate. There was a lot at first, and after a while, nothing.

When he called, at last, it was the next morning and he woke me up. Somehow, I had fallen asleep on my couch. I couldn’t remember when that had happened. I was still wearing all my clothes, the food was still on the table, just the bottle of wine I had cooled was now empty. I can’t say I was hungover. A single bottle wouldn’t do that to me, just yet. Maybe it would today. I haven’t tried. Hangover or no hangover, I was in absolute misery and every limb was screaming in pain as I reached for my phone. I was grateful it was at least within arm’s reach and not in a different room. It’s not that I didn’t want to get up per se, it’s that I couldn’t.  
“Miles.”  
“Yes?”  
“Oh, good, you’re picking up. I’ve been trying for a while.”  
“Have you?”  
“Yeah. It’s early, and I’m a stupid idiot, I get it. I don’t blame you.”  
“Alright,” I said, mindlessly, slowly coming to terms with reality. My head hurt.   
“Anyway. Whenever you can. I’m at the hotel next to the studio. There’s a big one right next to it. Remember?”  
“I don’t, actually.”  
“Well, if the studio’s address is still in your sat nav you should have no problems, right?”  
“I don’t think so.”  
“I’m there right now. If you can’t come and pick me up, that’s fine. I’ll figure something out. Don’t feel obliged. Okay?”  
“No, that’s okay. I’ll be there in a minute.”  
“That’s really sweet,” he said. His voice sounded like honey and rainbows and sunbeams. “I’ll wait for you in the lobby, then.”  
“See you soon.”  
“Yeah, see you soon.”  
He texted me while I frantically got my hygiene, outfit and hair in order. No letters. Just hearts. Rows of tiny red hearts.

I found him in the lobby, as promised. It looked like a simple hotel- fancy home décor, but nothing that looked very expensive. As if I had walked into a forty-year old stay-at-home mom’s living room, there was a lot of purple and there were a lot of pillows. It was also pretty dark in there, having walked in the bright daylight. It was already past noon. I didn’t see him until he addressed me.  
“Hey!”  
Even in my sorry state (the veins in my head throbbing painfully, every movement sluggish and tiring) he took my fucking breath away. The way he threw his hair back, with that signature nonchalance. It wasn’t an act. All his attention was genuinely on me, not on himself or the way he was casually striking those poses. He was the real thing- as if he had just waltzed out of a black and white cowboy movie, or a seventies California made-for-cable soft porn. You know what, I’ll stop trying to define it; I just know he was exactly my type in every single way, in every aspect, and from every angle. I wanted to grab him and haul him back to my car (our car, I guessed) right there. I somehow managed to keep it casual and discrete. Hands in my pockets. I took off my sunglasses. He kept his on.  
“Hi. Let’s go.”  
“Yes, gladly.”  
He followed me to the car, which was parked in the parking lot just a block away. The spots in front of the hotel were all full. As we took the short walk, I noticed he was looking around, as if he was searching for something.  
“What’s up?”  
“Nothing.”  
But he kept doing it, looking over his shoulder, into side streets and alleyways. He pressed his sunglasses higher up his nose. His hands were trembling. It was obvious even if you weren’t really paying attention.   
“Paparazzi on your back, or something?” I asked once we were in the seclusion of the car. “The police, possibly?”  
“What? No,” he answered, looking out the window nervously.  
“You know no one can see us, right?”   
A tall girl in a summer dress with short, dark hair came walking towards us on the sidewalk. She might have glanced over to our car, but we were completely invisible to her.  
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Alex stammered. “Can we go now?”  
“Of course we can.” I didn’t have to wait for the sat nav; I knew my way back home. I switched it off and left the parking lot.   
He was babbling the entire way back. Without allowing me to get even a few words in he explained how he had arrived with the bus with the others, how they had organised a little after party at the hotel I had just picked him up from. He told me that he had danced with strangers whose faces he didn’t even remember, strangers who didn’t seem to appreciate his moves very much (“They had no idea what they were looking at”). He told me how late it had gotten, too late for him to call me- that would have been inconsiderate- and how he had been so drunk he had had one of his mates book a room for him so he could sleep off his delirium. How he had forgotten to set any alarm, which for him was business as usual, and had been woken up by the cleaning service knocking on his door.   
“You look good for someone recovering from a severe hangover,” I noted.  
“Yeah, I don’t know…” He checked out his hair in the mirrors. “I guess it was just really good vodka.”

He helped himself and grabbed a beer from my fridge when we got back. Feeling a bit embarrassed I emptied the table. I think he hadn’t seen the remnants of my meal. I still took it out of sight as quickly as I could.  
“Listen, I made this curry yesterday and there’s still a lot left, would you mind having it tonight?”  
“Of course I wouldn’t mind. Not one bit. Your curries are lovely. Even better the next day.”   
“So,” I said after I had put the kettle on. No beers for me, just a strong cup of black breakfast tea with milk, thanks. “How was it?”  
“Oh, it was magnificent,” he grinned, leaning back on my couch. “It was magic, from beginning to end; magic.”  
“When can we expect new material? Your fans have barely survived the drought.”  
He shrugged. “I dunno. We’ll have a meeting on Thursday to discuss what we have but I’m off until then.”  
Off until Thursday- my imagination was slowly kicking back into gear as my hangover faded. I sipped my tea, desperately hoping it would make me feel better so I could do what I wanted with him. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him and after a while, he started to notice.  
“Hey, Miles,” he said, a playful tone in his voice. It told me everything I had to know. I put my cup of tea on the table and he crawled towards me until he was in my arms, his hands on my head.  
“Your hair is so soft. I never get used to it.”  
“Try shaving it off and you can have it that soft, too.”  
I pulled his hair and he slapped my hand away. “Never.”  
“I don’t know. I think it would look good on you. Everything looks good on you.”  
“Mm.” Too busy kissing my face, he didn’t answer.

He took off his sunglasses when we were upstairs and I understood immediately why he had kept it up for so long. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed earlier, why I hadn’t connected the dots when I should have. I think it comes down to that age-old adagio: love is blind. Alex was perfect to me and I chose not to see anything that might chip away at that image. I couldn’t deny it, though, not when I saw his pupils; he was high as a kite. And he had been ever since I had picked him up. Hell, he probably had been when he had phoned me. I started to worry he had been high for a significant percentage of the time I had spent with him, but this worry spiked very abruptly and very harshly and then became dormant; buried deep inside of me. He didn’t give me any space to contemplate it, anyway, because he was all over me. He had me stripped bare within a minute.

I had once read somewhere that overly affectionate behaviour is a side-effect of cocaine use. For a side-effect, it was welcome.   
…Is what I told myself. In the same way that I told myself that it wasn’t that serious. That there aren’t many musicians without this habit. That he probably knew what he was doing. That I never did this with him and that it wasn’t my place to say something about it. That the effects would wear off and it was no use doing something now. That I just had to wait.   
But I wondered. I wondered who they were. His bandmates? I didn’t know why but I couldn’t imagine. So who were they, those people who did coke and God knows what else with him? Those people he got high with?

He fell asleep next to me, for a short while. I watched his chest rise and fall. I found myself checking the veins in his neck to see how fast the blood was going through them and had to stop myself there. I looked the other way, got out of bed. My bare feet on the wooden floor and the soft rug felt happy, and healthy. It was a simple form of delight that did not need any sort of chemicals to come about. (My mind was constantly going in the same direction, can you see it?)  
He was awake soon enough, asking for cigarettes. I didn’t have them, so we ventured out again to fetch him some Marlboro’s. He saw muffins at the little bakery section of the shop near my house and demanded I tried one with him. He stuffed his mouth with them. When he had finished one he got himself another from the pack.  
“You’re really into those, aren’t you?”  
“That’s because they’re the best.”  
I didn’t much care for them. But then, I never really had cared for pastries.   
“What if we went to a real good tea place for an old-fashioned scone,” I suggested. “I happen to know one. When it comes to sweets and cakes I’m sure they could satisfy all your cravings.”  
“Sounds good to me. Do they deliver?”

He stayed with me for a couple of days. They were bright, but not too bright: they seem to be painted in a red and orange glow in my memory. They were slow, but not boring. We talked, we listened to my old records. He played me a few songs on one of my guitars. He tuned it after having been left alone collecting dust in a corner for years. It’s probably still tuned, now, but it could use a bit of his attention. Well, it’s not alone in that.  
I poured him wine, I fed him dinner and all of the cupcakes and muffins and scones he wished for. We went for walks, we went for drives. Whatever we were doing or what we had set out to do, we were interrupted by our own clinginess. I had gotten used to kissing him whenever I wanted- after checking if someone was looking, of course, that part hadn’t gone away- and he constantly touched me. His hands seemed to gravitate towards me in the most natural and normal way. It was extraordinary to me. None of my exes had been _this_ ready to show affection. Not that it’s any use to compare them. None of my exes had been Alex.   
In short, I was happy; overly, intensely, ridiculously happy. Happy to have him here, in my house, again. Delighted that had returned to me, that he was by my side. Maybe it’s the contrast with what came later that gave those days their extra glossy shine, in retrospect. Or maybe I actively chose to be this happy, since the nagging feeling that something wasn’t right was always present and I sensed it would all come crashing down; wanting to ride this train while I still could. I don’t know. It’s challenging, explaining your own feelings. Some people are very sensitive to them. Poets. Writers. I am not one of them. I sometimes think that emotions come to me slowly, with a delay, if that makes sense at all. It’s a weak explanation since it only applies to negative emotions, for me, but it’s the best explanation I have. It explains why I didn’t immediately see a gigantic red flag when one night, he announced that he wanted to go back to his house. His own house.

“I think it might be good for me.”  
I had dreaded this moment and only realised that I had now, now that it was too late and it had already materialised. I swallowed, forced myself to look over to him. There he sat, on the tip of my best chair, one leg crossed over the other, fancy marine blue loafers on his feet and a glass of white wine in his hand that he had just helped himself to. His eyes were on me. He was gauging my reaction. Since I didn’t have one I slowly slid my hand over my chin, feeling every sharp individual little hair in the stubble I would need to shave off. One of these days.  
“You know.” He sniffed. “A healing thing.”  
“One of your hippie chicks taught you that word?” I snickered.  
“Miles thinks I have a harem at my disposal,” Alex sighed and took another gulp of wine.  
“No. It was just a jab at ‘healing’. The word.”  
“I don’t see what’s weird about it. And I know you agree.” He looked up at me, slyly. “Don’t you?”  
On any other evening, I would have said ‘healing’ (the word) made me think of aura reading clubs and cuddle workshops done by, and for, total creeps who preferred these social gatherings over just going to a pub; to get a bird, or a church; to find meaning, for all I cared- and on any other evening we would have been able to laugh about it. Laugh so much we would have been in tears.   
“I think that’s something only you can judge,” I put it diplomatically.  
“Well, yes of course,” he reacted, slightly piqued. He didn’t fall for it, my sweetheart. “I was asking your opinion. Because you know me so well.”  
“It depends. If you think you’re ready I’m sure it would be okay.”  
“I think it’ll be more than ‘okay’. I think it would be an improvement. See, the nightmares that used to _plague_ me,” he made a dramatic wrist gesture here, “are gone. I don’t have them anymore.”  
“That is true.”   
“So. I think I need to face my fears and get the fuck over it. It’s my own bloody house and my own property and I’m never there. Seems like a waste of money.”  
My throat felt dry. Maybe it would go sore soon. “Do you miss it?”  
He seemed to ponder that question. “I suppose,” he said. “I don’t often think about it. I don’t miss its assets- the pool and the cooking suite and all that. That’s all confetti. It’s a different kind of missing. I guess I miss having my own place.” He locked his eyes to me. Here it comes, I thought.  
“That is not to say that I don’t like being here. I appreciate your company and everything you do for me.”  
I nodded. Sipped on my wine. We had bought it that afternoon.  
“I just think… I’m not ready to let that house go. Just like that. I have thought about it before, though…”  
“You wanted to move to the seaside.”  
“Yes. I do. I did consider doing that.” He put his glass on my table. “Things have changed a bit in the meantime but I might still be doing that. In the future. For now, I think going back to my house will be the healthy thing to do.”  
The theory might have some weight to it. If he had been working this out with a licensed therapist. Or a medical doctor. I had been the only one filling that position and I was, for lack of a better term, not exactly qualified. Unless his band retreat had been a cover for a therapist’s practice or a rehab facility I was doubting he had ever stepped into anyone’s office with these kinds of personal problems.  
“Aren’t you afraid it’d be too early?”  
“Come on, man. I have been here for so long I have lost count of the days.”  
 _Twenty-one_.  
“I can’t depend on your hospitality forever.” He smiled at my probably pouting face. He got up and tapped my nose with his finger. “And as I said. That is not an insult to your hospitality. It’s been really great here and that is all thanks to you.”  
I put my arm around his waist and pressed my face against his stomach.  
“I’ve been a terrible guest,” he declared.


	12. Voices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On Alex's request, Miles takes him back to his own house. He tells himself that it will be good for him. Maybe it is. But not for long.

It wouldn’t be long before I would be yelling at myself. But when I got in the Mercedes and adjusted the mirrors, the lights, my sunglasses for the late afternoon drive, I didn’t know that. I was calm. I was rational. And after all, I was simply helping a friend, in my own modest way. He wanted to go somewhere and I would take him where he wanted to be.   
There were moments when that attitude was not enough and I needed more rationalisations. It wasn’t just the right thing for him, it was also the right thing for me. See, when this had all started I had profited from him being spooked by his home. It had been wonderful but I wouldn’t call it a good foundation for a lasting relationship (which is, of course, what I wanted it to be). I could also consider it a test. A test to see what would happen if I let him go. If he would return to my arms, well, that would speak volumes. If he wouldn’t, it hadn’t been worth it anyway. A philosophy any horror film would advise against but one your basic romcom would commend. I told myself that what we had needed was more faith, from my side. Alex deserved to be free. I wouldn’t want him to be stuck in my house forever. Right?

His attitude on our way to the mansion was a complete turnaround from what it used to be. He leaned back in his seat, fidgeted with the car radio, trying to connect it to his phone, and picked some music. I looked beside me because I could hardly believe it, but he was humming along. The first time that had ever happened in my days of chauffeuring a professional singer.  
“It feels weird, sometimes,” I said. We were about halfway.  
“What does?” Alex was distracted by his phone screen. He had been the entire day.  
“How do I put this…” I was legit wondering. “Your profession.”  
“What, me writing some nonsense and getting paid to play it?”  
“The idea that things you have written are in the brains of other people. Actually, that must be great for you.”  
“Hm-hm.”  
“And there’s recordings of your voice everywhere. People listening to your voice and looking at you…”  
“Oh, you don’t know half of it. We’ve done so many photo sessions, lately I’m just spacing out every time we do one.”  
“I’m sure there are a lot of pictures of you lads.”  
“It’s completely tiresome. I’ve been over my own face for years.”  
“Why is it so hard for me to believe that?”   
“Okay, let me rephrase that. I’ve been over my persona for years.”  
“I’m afraid that doesn’t mean much to me because I never see your persona.”  
“Yeah. Right,” he said, but I had the sense he wasn’t quite listening to me. He was engulfed in his conversations, typing away on the screen.  
“I’m jealous, I guess,” I laughed out loud. I sounded like an old joker. I knew why.   
“What for?” Alex asked, looking up from his phone.   
“Oh, you being a commodity for the masses, and all that.”  
He laughed. “You know, Miles, I can’t understand why on earth you ever became a driver. You have a way with words. Do you ever write?”  
“No, not really. Nothing since my poetry notebook from middle school.”  
“That must’ve been something.”  
“It really wasn’t.”  
“In any case, Miles, there’s nothing to be jealous about.”  
“Alright.”  
“We take this thing very seriously, me and the boys. There’s bands who let other stuff get in the way of the work… we never wanted to be that kind of band. We’re too much in love with the work. We keep things nice and separated from our private lives.” He smiled to himself. The low sun shone on his face. “I’m really glad we talked things through last week.”  
“Oh, did you?”  
“Yeah. That probably factored into this. You know, me feeling safe enough to go back home.”  
“Should be great when you can invite them over again, huh?”  
“Definitely. My parties used to be top-notch.”  
  
The afternoon progressed. It had been a lovely day and rush hour back into the city was slowly starting to gain traction. As we travelled the opposite way, we weren’t bothered by it too much.   
I couldn’t suppress a shiver when I rolled up towards the driveway. The familiar dark pines were unchanged. So was the particular way the sunlight passed through the trees.   
He tapped the code on the alarm system and hopped back in the car. I asked him a question I should have asked from the start.  
“Would you like me to go with you? Check it out, see if everything’s fine?”  
I was a little bit surprised when he shook his head. “Nah, that’s alright. People have been here, it’s all clean.” He pointed at the hedges, the paths, the pool. “I’ll be okay.”  
I tried to get a reading on his face. It was so indifferent. Being here again should have been kind of a big deal to him based on my experience. It clearly wasn’t. It puzzled me.   
“Well, if you’re sure you’ll be okay on your own.”  
“Don’t worry.”  
I tried not to while I stepped out of the car. “I’m always available on my phone when you need me, you know that.”  
“I do.”  
For a short, quiet moment, we stood facing each other. This is goodbye, I thought. I didn’t know why I was thinking that. I just did.  
“Well, I wish you good luck,” I said.  
“Thanks.”  
“If you have any nightmares you can always call me. Even if it’s in the middle of the night.”  
He smiled. “I know.”  
A wave of warmth rose within me, so heavy I almost feared my body wouldn’t be able to contain it. I reached out to him and pressed him close to me, against my chest, the way we had stood so often. He breathed against me; I felt his chest rise and fall. I lost track of which heartbeat was mine and which was his. Why did it feel different this time, on this day? I didn’t want to let him go and our embrace lasted much longer than either of us had expected.   
“Miles?” he finally said with a little voice. I let him go. His hair was ruffled up and he looked a bit flushed. His lips were a shade of pink and red I could have stared at for hours.   
“Thank you for bringing me here.”  
“Don’t mention it. I’ll talk to you soon.”  
“Have a good drive home.”  
He raised his hand, waving at me while I walked back to the car. I had to turn around and look the other way, or I wouldn’t have been able to leave him. I didn’t get why this was so hard on me. All I had done was do as he had requested. Nothing bad had happened and nothing would. I scolded myself for being a needy, jealous, clingy boyfriend once I was back in the driver’s seat. After I was done I scolded myself some more for considering myself his official boyfriend. I drove off and left Alex there.

That night, we messaged back and forth a bit. His answers were sporadic while I replied to him immediately after every message. After a few times it was a clear pattern. I asked him what he was doing and he explained something about cleaning up and getting back in touch with some people he hadn’t talked to in a long while. Both of these things were plausible. I did my best to put my worries aside, shelve them in a different place in my brains, and watched some telly. I went online and ordered a few films. I planned a trip to the library and the record store the next day. Checking their websites, they should both be open on Sunday. Once I had verified that I sighed the deepest sigh I had sighed in what felt like forever and leaned back on my couch.   
“You’re going to have to entertain yourself for the time being, Kane,” I mumbled to myself. I watched a movie I had had in my DVD collection for at least a year (the receipt was in the case and it was dated in July 2019) and still hadn’t seen. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and opened a months-old bag of crisps. I went to bed early.

What happened next may be very predictable to you. I can imagine an outsider picking up on the cycle a lot quicker than I could myself, being an active participant in this maelstrom. It’s always been difficult for me to analyse social situations. Usually, I needed one of my friends to point out to me that I hadn’t been the most subtle with a joke, or I needed some time in order to understand that my relationship with my ex had been far too one-sided for it to work out. With Alex, I was so swept away, so deeply in love it was impossible for me to stay objective. I can look at it neutrally now, but it took a lot of time and a lot of hours of chatting with my mates. Anyway, what happened was: he called me in the middle of the night. Again. Breathing heavily, sounding completely freaked out.  
“Miles,” he gasped in the microphone. “Miles.”  
“Baby, what’s wrong?” I checked the clock; it said 04:13.  
“Come get me,” he cried. “Please.”  
“I’ll be with you in twenty minutes. Can you hold on for that long?”  
“No,” his shaking voice said.   
“That’s the best I can do. I’m so sorry. Just stay cool, okay? I’m on my way.”  
“Okay…”  
“Wait. I’ll stay on the phone. I’ll go put on some clothes, I’ll put you on speaker.”  
“Okay. Thank you.”  
“Just talk to me if you want to. Tell me anything.”  
He let out a trembling sigh. “I don’t know what to talk about. I’m sorry.”  
“Something fun. Something that makes you feel better.”  
“That’s just kind of hard right now.”  
“Well,” I continued, trying to simultaneously pull a shirt over my head and switch my phone to speaker, “how do you feel?”  
“I don’t know.”  
“Can you put it into words?”  
“I don’t think I can.”  
“Are you feeling pain, anywhere?”  
“No, not exactly. I… My chest feels heavy. I can’t breathe.”  
“Sounds like you’re just really scared.”  
“Yeah, I’m sure, but it feels like I’m fucking _dying_.”  
I had overheard some conversations between Kelly and Eleanor when they had been in their early twenties and very stressed. About their rent, their studies, their futures. Eleanor had been suffering from panic attacks and Kelly, who had already been working at a care facility back then, had given her some tips to get through them. This sounded exactly like Ellie’s symptoms from back in the day. Here’s what I had to do: I had to convince Alex that what he was feeling was not that serious; distract him; and stay by his side.   
“I know it’s hard to believe but you’re not gonna die.”  
“How do you know that? Are you a bloody doctor?”  
“It sounds like a panic attack. It feels terrible but physically you’re probably perfectly fine.”  
“Fuck, this does _not_ feel like any regular panic attack.”  
Spoken like somebody experiencing a regular panic attack.  
“Listen, Alex, it’s going to be okay. Just keep talking to me.” I slipped into some shoes, grabbed my keys and walked out of my door. “Believe me. Keep breathing, that’s all you need to do.”  
“I’m trying.”  
“Great! Just keep going. Try to…” I got in the car. “Try to make the exhales longer than the inhales.”  
“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay.”  
I let him work on his breathing. When I left my neighbourhood and went on the motorway, he started to make strange noises. They sounded a bit like squeaks and they freaked me out.  
“What’s happening?”  
“Everything is dark,” he answered. “Everything.”  
“Can’t you try the lights?”  
“I’m not in the house.”  
“You’re not? Where are you?”  
“I’m near the house. I can see the lights from here.”  
“Well, what about going back there to wait for me?”  
“No. I can’t. I…” he let out a groan. It almost sounded as if he was in real, physical pain, which hit me like a fist to my stomach. In a reflex, I stepped on the gas.  
“I’m being watched,” he hissed. “Keep your voice down.”  
“Who is there?” I asked a logical question. “I thought you were alone?”  
“Fuck, Miles, can you stop being so fucking jealous for one fucking second?” he suddenly snapped at me.  
“What? I’m not jealous.” I was thrown off guard. “You told me you were being watched. By whom?”  
“Ugh, I can’t even say it,” he wailed.   
“The nightmares again?”  
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, the same one. I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep anymore. They’re never gonna stop. Never.”  
“Don’t say that, Alex. You don’t know that. You’re going to be fine, okay?”  
There was no answer. He stayed on the phone with me after he started crying. There was a thud, there was some rustling. There were his distant sobs. He had probably dropped the phone.

It took me some searching- shining my headlights in every direction- before I found him, lying on his side, in the foliage next to the driveway. I thought he was passed out, at first. I slapped him on his cheeks, gently. He opened his eyes. Even in the dark, I could see they were red and swollen.   
“Miles,” he said. It wasn’t often that I heard a voice this sad.  
“Can you get up?” I asked. “Can you stand?”  
“I don’t know.”  
“I can help you?”  
“I’m not sure,” he complained.  
“I’ll go call an ambulance.”  
“No, no, Miles, please. I think I can do it.”  
He did his best. He only had to lean on me for a short time, and as he slowly regained his breath, his footing became steadier. Suddenly, something inexplicable happened that even spooked me. There was a voice, in the darkness.   
“Alex!”  
Alex stood against me like a statue, his nails pressing harder into my shoulders. All of my blood turned cold in an instant.   
“Who was that?” I asked.  
He looked up to me with big, fearful eyes. Is it possible to physically feel someone else’s state of mind? Because I could physically feel his panic.  
“Don’t leave me,” is all that he said.  
I looked in the direction I thought the voice had come from. It had been a clear voice and it had definitely called out Alex’s name. Now, I couldn’t be sure, but I believed it had been a woman. Of course, there wasn’t a thing I could see. The floodlights were off. The only light source were my headlights and they were shining in what I believed was the opposite direction.  
“Don’t leave me,” Alex repeated, much louder this time. In fact, he was almost shouting the words in my face. He then said, abruptly and in a strangely solemn tone: “I love you.”  
My heart skipped a beat.   
He pressed his face against my chest. He said it again, his words muffled by my shirt but louder than before, especially in the night. “I love you, Miles.”  
“I love you, too,” I whispered.   
“Really?”  
“Yes, of course.”   
He wrapped his arms around me and gave me a deep kiss. At this point, I was dizzy from the breakneck pace of his emotions and reactions to what was happening around him. I broke our kiss and took a better look at his face. This wasn’t okay. He wasn’t okay. No matter which substances he had running in his bloodstream, he needed to get rid of them and sleep this off, whatever this was. I decided to get him out of there immediately.   
“Come on, let’s go.”  
He just stood there, the headlights hitting his features in a spectacular manner. Even now, he was beautiful. Maybe even more so than I had ever seen him. The contrast between the dark and the light on the angles of his face was so striking I vividly remember it until this day. That’s pretty remarkable because I didn’t have any time to admire it. I grabbed his hand, tried to coax him to get in the car. He didn’t move. I pulled at his arm. He still didn’t move, not even an inch. He just blinked at me. His lower lip trembled. Tears rolled out of his eyes and dropped on the dry sand. In an uncanny mirror image to what had happened before, months ago, I picked him up and carried him to the passenger’s seat. He was limp in my arms, like a big, heavy stuffed animal. Before I slammed my door shut I heard the voice again. It was slightly further away from us now. I couldn’t hear any words, this time.  
“Is there somebody else out there?” I asked Alex.  
“No.”  
“There has to be somebody. I can hear her.”  
“There’s no one there!”

Before I was out of the woods, it started raining. My windshield wipers had trouble keeping up, that’s how bad it was. Due to the weather and the other traffic on the motorway I couldn’t go as fast as I would have liked to.   
I checked his expression. It was difficult to see, because he was turned away from me, but it was unchanged. Silent tears.   
I reached for his hand. He grabbed it.   
Maybe this wasn’t the time. Still, I felt that I had to say something. I cleared my throat. My mouth tasted vaguely of salt and alcohol.  
“Forgive me for saying this, but we cannot go on like this.”  
When he didn’t respond, I continued. “You clearly need help. And it hurts me to see you this way. I’m sure it’s even worse for you and you don’t deserve to feel like this.”  
“You don’t know that. Maybe I do deserve it.”  
I frowned. Was he kidding?   
“I don’t know what you did tonight. I don’t know what you drank and I don’t know what the hell you used. It doesn’t matter; it needs to stop. That’s all I know.”  
“You’re mad at me,” he concluded.  
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not mad.”  
“You’re mad at me for making you drive all the way over here and coming to my rescue like I’m some kind of damsel.” He looked at me. The look in his eyes scared me. “You know, Miles, you’re right. I’m a wreck. I’m useless, and I disappointed you. I spent my entire life disappointing _everyone_. It’s all I’m good at; it’s all I’ve ever been good at.”  
“That is not what I mean!”  
He sat still, tears still silently welling up in the corners of his eyes. With one hand he held on to me. His other hand was pressed to his mouth and he stubbornly looked the other way, out the window. There was nothing to see except for the endless streams of water on the glass.  
“That place isn’t good for you. I’m sure you know that.” I was also sure he had known it, before he went back to it, but I didn’t say that part. “For whatever reason. You know I don’t believe in that tarot mysticism and even for me, it’s still plain to see that it’s not healthy for you.”  
I kept pausing in between my sentences, waiting for him to say something, hoping he would react in some way. There was nothing from his side.  
“I think you shouldn’t go back there until you have worked through some of your anxiety issues.” I swallowed, gathering my courage. “And until you have thrown out the drugs.”  
Me saying that out loud didn’t seem to shock him as much as it shocked me. I guess he was used to the weight of his own addictions by that time, while I was not. I hadn’t come to terms with the idea yet and I wasn’t sure when I would. It was all new to me and I had been unwilling to see it for all of this time. It only seemed to make him numb to what I was saying. It only hurt me.


	13. Gourmet breadcrumbs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tensions between the boys grow until they can no longer be contained or remain unspoken. Miles remembers his friend's words when he needs them the most.

It was quiet in my house. We listened to the rain slamming down on my roof for the rest of the night. Neither of us spoke.   
Isn’t it strange and almost unsettling how you can sense someone is slipping away from you? Like water through your fingers. I couldn’t hold on to Alex even though he was in my arms, the way he used to be. I didn’t know what else I could say to him after our drive home. I had spoken my mind. It was his turn, now, his turn to talk to me, to explain what had happened that night. He was the one who needed to tell me about his plans and intentions to change the situation he was in. As long as he did not do so I had nothing more to say. Nothing I would say could bring him to talk about it, anyway. It wouldn’t mean anything unless it came from within himself.  
I knew he was awake and he knew I knew. I stroked his hair. The first birds started to sing their songs. They would soon stop singing. October was right around the corner.

I couldn’t stay in bed any longer. My limbs felt stiff and I knew they would grow painful very soon if I didn’t get up and do something. I took a shower and got dressed and before I walked down the stairs I peeked through the open door. Alex was still in bed, his back turned to me.  
An hour or so later I heard running water. I chewed on my toast. It felt like chewing on some week-old oven pizza from Tesco. I wasn’t hungry. I put the plate on the kitchen counter and made more tea, instead.   
Alex showed up in my living room. He looked at me through his lashes and immediately cast his eyes down again. Fumbling with a carton of cigarettes he stepped out the back door to have a smoke underneath the small awning. It was still raining. The street looked miserable. I felt bad for the girl delivering courier packages when she passed my house, wearing yellow rainwear with a hoodie but still absolutely soaked. She usually did the rounds on my block. I ordered stuff fairly regularly and had never given her a tip, not once. Were courier people allowed to accept tips, I wondered. I tried to look it up on my phone. I tried not to look towards the garden.

Nobody really enjoys Sundays, or do they? Please let me know if you are the exception.  
I did okay when I used to have my job at Musgrave’s. Saturday nights were agony, making the contrast with the calm Sunday afternoons very stark. An oasis to recharge my energy for the week ahead of me. Before I had bumped into Alex, by some crazy streak of fate, I had spent my Sundays in peace and quiet. My weeks had had a certain rhyme and reason to them, making it easier to digest the passing time. I stared at my empty tea cup thinking about how I missed those Sundays. The realisation sent a shock through me.   
I looked at Alex. He had finished his cigarette. He had probably had two. That was his personal morning ritual. He was now just standing there, meeting my gaze. The raindrops fell on the tiles around his feet and slid down his left arm, which was unprotected by the awning. When he saw I was looking back at him he came back inside, neatly closing the door. He walked over to where I was sitting, at the kitchen table, stood behind me and put his arms around my neck. They were so cold and wet I shivered. He laid his cheek to mine. His hair tickled my ears. And I could tell myself whatever I wanted. I could try to be responsible and be my own guardian, protect myself against my short-term impulses- Alex reduced me to rubble. Each and every time. I turned around to face him. His lips brushed mine, almost casually, as if it didn’t mean much when it meant the entire world. Both of us hesitated. Both of us held our breaths. Until we gave in. I was so fucking hungry for him. I hadn’t realised how much.   
He sat down on my lap, fiddling with the buttons on my shirt. I bit at him. If only I could make that face disappear. Make it go away like it never happened. He bit me back. He held my earlobe between his teeth, so careful, so endlessly tender. Why couldn’t he always be like this? I knew it was a fancy a teenager would have- why couldn’t we just stay in bed, every day, for the rest of our lives, and only get out to get food and drinks? I knew better. I had known better for a long time. I had moved on from that just like everybody else past the age of sixteen. It didn’t stop me from wishing it could be like this all the time. No unspoken secrets between us. No voices in the darkness. No tarot cards. It was the only wish I had.

That’s funny, I thought. My clock is ticking.  
I usually didn’t even hear it when I was here. As if it was hidden in a different layer of reality. Always there, but inaudible unless I actively tried to hear it.   
It was past six, almost half past six. I would need to fix myself some food, soon, I thought, somewhere in a corner of my mind. Maybe go by the fish and chips place round the corner. I hadn’t been in weeks. I would also need to put a playlist together, to get me through this. I would need to do a lot of different things. Even lifting my head to see the time was taking a lot out of me, though. I laid it back on my arm, where it had rested the past couple of hours.  
Alex was gone.

He had given me so many kisses my skin was glowing. He was so near me I could feel his pulse- when I laid my lips to his neck. His scent was all around me. It was in my sheets, in my room. I heard his voice in two different ways. I heard the little noises he made when I touched him. I heard them in real time and I heard them in my head. The nagging feeling of unease that I carried inside of me since we had first kissed, that first confusing night, was growing stronger by the minute. Its static became so loud it was overwhelming. I knew that he still loved me. It was undeniable, unmistakable. He threw himself at me with the devotion of a religious fanatic. He kissed me as if we had been apart for a full year. And I loved him. I was helpless, at his mercy. My body wasn’t keeping up with what my reason already knew. It operated on a different level and it didn’t want to know anything that would keep him from Alex.  
This well was bottomless. It was. At least, I could believe that it was. Yet he still didn’t say a word to me. After all of this. We were quiet in my kitchen, quiet in my bedroom. He made perfect, wordless love to me. Then, he got up and walked away from me. When I saw him again downstairs he was looking at something on his phone. He looked up and started to speak. Now, this very moment, was the time to use words again, as far as he was concerned.  
“Would you mind taking me home?”  
It felt like a slap in the face. Was he serious? I tried to see a hint, a clue on his face that would show me he was joking. Even though it was nothing to poke fun about. But no, he just looked tired. The implications were mind-blowing.   
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I would mind.”  
“I’m sorry?”  
“Don’t act like you don’t know why.”  
“I’m not sure that I do?”  
It was buzzing around in my mind, over and over again; a voice, a woman’s voice. It had been present the entire day, now that I thought about it. It finally dawned on me who it was. Rukaiyah. My friend Rukaiyah, repeating a single word: _breadcrumbs._   
“I’m not doing it. I’m not taking you back there. I’m surprised you are asking me, to be honest. I’m astounded you’ve got the balls.”  
“Well, you are my driver.”  
“Then why do you treat me like I’m garbage?”  
“What the bloody hell are you on all of a sudden?”  
“I could ask you the same question. And I could ask you why you’re still on it when you know you shouldn’t be.”  
“Oh, fuck me, is this the ‘drugs are bad for you’ lecture again, Miles? What the fuck do you know about it? Nothing. You know nothing about it.” He rolled his eyes and stared at the ceiling.   
“It isn’t just the drugs, Alex. They’re insignificant in the bigger picture, to be honest. It’s the whole thing. It comes down to this: you’re not honest. Not to me, but not to your friends, either. You are not the same person outside these walls as the person you are when you’re alone with me. I don’t know if I even know who you are.”  
He sighed, in a mixture of theatrics and annoyance I hoped to never hear again. “Is this about the bi thing? It’s nothing to me. I am me and there’s no name for that. I know you wish I was just like you. I’m not.”  
I didn’t want that at all and the mere suggestion almost rendered me speechless. Almost.  
“I’m not dragging you out of the closet. I’d never do that. But what you do, this… hiding parts of yourself from others- it’s not healthy for you to live like this.”  
He scoffed. “You’re awfully invested in my life. You might want to direct all of that attention to yourself, for once.”  
“Maybe, but I’m talking about you. It hurts me to see you like this.”  
“I’m doing well, thanks.”  
“You’re not. You’re drifting along, you’re not making decisions. I think it’s time you made a few adult decisions.”  
“You’re not my fucking dad!” He was shouting, now.   
“I’m not and I can’t make you do anything. I don’t want to. You’re a free man. You can play all the games you want to play. But I won’t have any part in it. Not anymore. I’m not taking you home. Not now and not ever, until you have sorted things out.”  
He sighed impatiently, ticking his nails to his phone screen. “Do we have to do this now? Do we honestly have to?”  
“Well, when were you going to talk about it? I’ve been waiting the entire day and nothing happened, so…”  
“Oh have you?” He glared at me. “You seemed pretty occupied with other things to me.”  
I didn’t have anything to say to that. Knowing that that mouth, those pretty lips, had covered my entire face with kisses less than thirty minutes ago was now unimaginable.  
“I don’t see why you have to be all up in my business like this. It’s not exactly your place.”  
“Wouldn’t you do the same if I was living a lie?”  
“ _Living a lie_ ,” he huffed. “These bloody dramatics.”  
“It’s not dramatic; it’s the truth.”  
“Fine.”   
“It’s fine, is it?”  
“Yes, it is.” He tapped his phone and walked towards the hall. “I’m calling a cab.”  
He grabbed his coat, threw a few of his belongings in a bag and walked out the door, leaving me standing in the middle of the room, not believing my eyes. He slammed the front door shut. I could see him on the sidewalk, talking to someone on the phone, lighting another cig. The rain returned, even if it was just a drizzle. He stood outside in his light jacket, cold in the cutting wind. He didn’t come back, didn’t change his mind. He waited until the cab rolled up, got in and disappeared.  
  
My clock was ticking away.  
 _Breadcrumbs_ , I thought to myself. Breadcrumbs.   
Supporting my weight with my arms I lifted myself into a seated position. My phone was on the table. I grabbed it as if it was a life preserver. I opened my messages. My thumbs hovered above the tiny keyboard until I understood that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell my friends about this even if my whole existence felt like a joke right now and I needed their support more than ever. I knew that if I would start a conversation about Alex with any one of them, but especially with Ellie who was my first choice in these matters of the heart, I would run my mouth. I wouldn’t be able to keep Alex’s identity a secret. How could I, when I wanted to scream everything I knew about him, throw it all out on the internet, write it on walls? I put the phone on silent and left it on the table when I went to bed.   
The hours I spent there were free of sleep but filled with panic and thinly veiled nightmares. Alex whispered things to me all night long. It was grueling. If you’d ask me I wouldn’t be able to say which was worse; echoes of his sweet pillow talk or the last things he had said to me before that cabbie had taken him away from me.   
That wasn’t even the end of it. My exes stopped by and treated me to the most memorable stuff they had said to me, making me relive the end of every single relationship I had ever had, until it was all a merry little fucking party. I cursed at my brains, wired as they were. Always ready, always waiting behind the curtains to hand me the worst pain and the darkest outlook on whatever was happening to me. This was _not_ a pattern, no matter what the deepest, darkest grooves etched on the inside of my skull wanted me to believe. I refused to believe that this was the same old loop I would be stuck in until the day I croaked.  
Under my blankets, it was too cold and too warm at the same time. I thought I was sick the next day and felt glad, honestly, that Alex hadn’t tried to get in touch again. No new messages, no new kicks to my stomach. Plus: no jobs. The rest was sorely needed. I grabbed my blanket and lifted it up to my chin, dedicated to sit this out. I rolled to my other side and finally fell asleep at six in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry <3


	14. Our devil card

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pinegrove sends Miles an unexpected taxi job. He takes it, no questions asked. It does not exactly turn out the way he had thought it would.

All of this had happened before.  
Different names, different spaces. The only constant: me.

I wasn’t the one to break the silence. Now that we are looking back and searching for regularities and recurring themes, I can tell you that I never have been. For others it might be caused by pride, a stubborn unwillingness to make the first move to make amends. To be fair, if you have done nothing wrong I can sympathise with this, even if it solves nothing. There are also folks who get very anxious and closed-off in conflict and feel that giving up is less stressful than going the distance. Where am I on this scale, you might ask? I’m not sure. I think I get serious too fast. So if- sorry, not if, when- when it ends, I’m far too devastated to do anything, least of all get up close and personal with the source of my grief again. All of the good things are overcast by clouds, soured by what happened after, and I can’t integrate the pain with the happiness. Going back to it will not make it better. It will only make it worse. Or maybe that isn’t true at all. Maybe it’s all make-believe of a cornered soul. I wouldn’t know. I never tried it. Once I get stung you best believe I will leave the beehive alone.

It was so hard. One of the hardest things I ever had to do.   
Not because I wasn’t sure of my decision, hell no, I was ready to never talk to Alex again in my whole life if that was what he so chose. That did not mean that I wasn’t worried. I was worried sick. I laid in bed wondering what he was doing, who he was talking to. If he was scared. Scared like he had been at the nights when he had begged me not to let him go because fragments of his dreams were still chasing him. When he had been holding on to me like I was his last friend on earth.  
Most of all, I wondered how he was, what façade he was conjuring up to hide who he was. What kind of image he wanted to leave in the memories of his no doubt admiring onlookers (how could you not admire him? Especially when he was making an effort). I sometimes wished I could be around, take a peek. See what was going on around his pool these days. In the end, though, I was grateful that I didn’t know. Only idiots who have never developed beyond grade school go back to their crushes to spy on them. I would not be that fool. I persisted.

Eventually, the decision was made for me. Pinegrove updated my agenda. In the weeks before my relationship with Alex that had happened almost on a daily basis, accompanied with a cheerful ‘pling!’ sound programmed in their preferred phone app. It had continued during the weeks Alex had lived here with me. He had been kind and mindful enough (surprisingly so, I could now say, now that I was at a certain emotional distance from him) to enter the jobs in the system himself, knowing that both Pinegrove and I might need the paperwork for future reference. Taxes and the like. He had even logged on to the system on my old laptop one night, and had never logged off, allowing me to make my own adjustments. It was easier. I was usually the one keeping track of what we were doing, the one making plans, even if those plans had been no more than drives out of town solely for our own enjoyment.   
There had been nothing for four days, now, and I had been getting used to this total radio silence. Now that it was broken it was no longer welcome; a rude intrusion in a peaceful oasis. What did it matter that the oasis was a wasteland of suffering? It was my own. I was comfortable here, without Alex, without Pinegrove.   
I lifted my head from my pillow. That’s right, office hours are a thing and there are people who are working, I thought to myself. Somehow, it all didn’t feel real to me.  
The numbers and letters on the phone screen were objective enough.  
  
Date: OCTOBER 4 (SUN), 2020  
Time: 12:30  
From: […] hotel, […] street  
To: Manchester airport / Terminal 1 / BA 7283   
Arrival time: 13:30  
Number of persons: 1  
Luggage: None  
Booked under: PINEGROVE - A. Turner (client)  
  
Bloody hell, it was 11:15 in the morning and it _was_ Sunday, October the 4th. The red stripes making numbers on my old radio weren’t playing tricks on me. It was just that this agenda app had only now been given the update. He wasn’t giving me any time to prepare, was he?  
I looked at my sorry state in the bedroom mirror. I remembered how Alex had stood here, right where I was standing right now. His feet on my floor. One on the floorboards, one on the carpet. I shook my head and decided to show up. What choice did I really have? No time to prepare might have been for the best. This is who I was, this is what he had reduced me to. This is the power he had over me. It was for the best to be honest and upfront about it. I couldn’t even bring myself to be nervous about seeing him again, anymore.

This wreck, yours truly drove all the way to the designated address. There were no hiccups, no bumps in the road. The Mercedes flew through the city like a low hovering bird. Roadblocks were easy to circumvent that weekend; all expected and noted in advance. Weather was alright; the pouring showers had stopped sometime on my third day in bed and the clouds were depressing, but no rain fell down from them.   
The hotel was a place I had never been before. Now, I have seen many hotels in my old town but when so many new ones are being erected and so many people have side gigs renting out their unused floors as studios and apartments it’s no longer possible to keep up.   
The place looked new and was basking in its utter lack of history, charm and personality. The way its yellow bricks were positioned (vertically) made my skin crawl. Call me a snob- I couldn’t stand the ugliness on display. Maybe I was getting old, but these things are popping up everywhere nowadays. It’s getting worse and worse, don’t you agree?   
I looked around for a place to park. Of course this hotel was of the type to have a gigantic parking lot, much bigger than necessary. There were only a handful of other cars. All regular models, family sedans. The barriers were raised and I could let myself in.   
The parking lot was a reflection of the hotel itself. Fresh, clean, sparkling in its newness and at the same time absolutely revolting. Hedgerows guarded the hotel guests’ privacy, all neatly pruned at just about eye height. I clapped the sun visor back in its place and looked around. No Alex. Nobody. The place was deserted, the revolving doors weren’t even moving. Then again, who would willingly come here at a time like this?   
“Oh, shut up, Mr. Frowny Face,” I said to myself. Good lord it was time for a vacation. I had been meaning to start reading A room with a view. So far, I hadn’t been able to get past the first chapter (the fault was all mine, definitely not the book’s; it was funny as hell). Maybe I should go over to Italy, see Florence. Pack a suitcase. Not too much luggage; travelling light. I had never made a journey abroad on my own before. The idea had never really manifested. I had always joined my mates on their holidays filled with beaches and fancy drinks. Those trips had been legendary, obviously; but finding time for myself was practically impossible in a budget hotel where we shared rooms, or in the large bars where we went to at night, or on the crowded beaches. Time for myself was what I needed right now, I was certain of it. Just the idea of conversing with friends exhausted me.   
Italy seemed like the perfect escape from where I was. My steady contract had been enough to provide me with a few savings, even if it had only been a three months’ salary. So, I asked myself, why not? It couldn’t be too expensive, especially in the off-season. I wanted to get out. I was ready to get out. Leave this forlorn piece of rock and see the sun for fucking once. I was done with England.  
The sound of wooden soles on the hideous pavement disturbed me from my dreams of warmer, more historical places. A quick glance confirmed that it was not Alex who was strolling out of the haunted house towards my- our- car. It was a woman. That observation meant that I would ignore her. I did have to wonder what she was doing here, alone on this dreary afternoon.   
The clicks of her heels grew louder until there was a knock on my window. What was this about? I rolled the window down.  
“Hello,” she said. It wasn’t a greeting, it sounded more like a question. A careful dipping of her big toe in a lake.  
“Sorry, Miss,” I said. “I’m waiting for a client.”  
I thought that would be the end of it, but when she didn’t walk after hearing that I looked back out the window. She stood in place, her feet in two blue ankle boots in perfect symmetry, not looking away from me. Her hands were grasping her purse, a stylish little thing with leopard print details, so tightly that her knuckles were turning white.  
A strange, unsettling feeling came over me that I had seen her before, somewhere.   
“Are you Miles?” she asked.   
  
She got in the back. This was fairly surprising; I had expected her to invite me over to the soulless vacuum of a hotel bar that was undoubtedly hidden behind the dark façade. Just to be sure that I wouldn’t lock the doors and kidnap her. But no.  
“We can talk here. But could you hand me the keys, for safety’s sake?” she asked. A reasonable lass. I gave her the car keys. I suppose she didn’t feel like taking the passenger’s seat. I wouldn’t have picked that spot, either. There she sat, her purse on her lap and her hands on her purse. I could tell she wanted to fidget with the chain and the lock. She restrained herself. Made herself look me in my eyes, take in the little she could see. The small rectangle reflecting my face.  
“I take it that you do not know who I am.”  
I shook my head.   
“I thought as much.” She looked at her hands and the simple but elegant green nail polish that hadn’t begun to chip yet. Maybe the sight of her manicure helped her focus.   
“I made this arrangement,” she said. “I made you come here. I’m sorry.”  
I already knew. How long had I known? Before this morning, that was for sure. Before he had left me last Sunday. Fuck, maybe I had known from the very beginning. It wasn’t too challenging a puzzle, now, was it? I hid my face in my hands.  
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, her voice shaking a little.  
“No, don’t be.”  
For a minute or so, the both of us were lost in our own thoughts. I looked at the hedges on the right hand of the parking lot, she looked at the hedges on the opposite side.   
  
“Can I ask you something?”   
“Sure.”   
“How…” she threw her hair over her shoulder, “…long have you been with Alex?”  
There was no use avoiding the truth. “Not too long. A month or two. And he was away for three weeks.”  
She nodded, slowly. “I see.”  
“He lived with me during those months.”  
“I see…”  
“You?” I bounced the ball back.  
“Oh, it’s been on and off for about a full year, now. I actually thought it was over this time. Apparently not. He called me on…” she went through her phone, probably her planner, “the 20th. He was staying at a hotel in the center. I don’t know why I went.”  
I coughed. There were tears. I think I was in shock. Yet, these revelations were not as surprising to me as they should have been. The undercurrent, consisting of small, subtle hints and a vague notion of things being in disarray had told me this, way, way before that day. I hadn’t listened to it back then. That was all.  
“And when did you last see him?”  
I swallowed. The wound was still so fresh. “Last Sunday.”  
She had to take a deep breath, to recompose herself. Her lip trembled but she got it under control.  
“What did he tell you?”  
She shrugged. The gesture made her look more crushed than before. “About you, nothing.”  
“And yet, here you are,” I made a face. A painful grin.   
“I saw you.”  
I asked her when that had happened. Another question I already knew the answer to. Another question I had known the answer to for a longer time than I had been willing to admit to myself. And the devil on the tarot card winked at me, danced before my eyes, pointing at the chains, laughing.   
“Outside the house. In the middle of the night. We had been drinking… You probably know how that goes. Then, all of a sudden he was having some kind of episode and ran off. I tried following him but it was like he had vanished. I didn’t know how big that park around his house was. You…” she faltered. “He called you, right? You came to fetch him. And he…” She could no longer stop the tears welling up in her eyes. She spread them open wide and looked at my image in the rearview mirror. “I thought you were just his _driver_.” She clenched her fists and for a fraction of a second I feared she would start slamming them on the leather, start screaming. Instead, she exhaled and fell back on her seat. “I thought you were his driver.”  
“Well, I am. I was.”  
“He just left me there,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Left me there in that house of his. On my own. Four in the morning.”  
“I didn’t know.”  
“Oh, you heard me.” There was a sting in her voice. I hung my head. She was right. The desire to lay my head to the steering wheel and block the whole world out was overwhelming.   
“Did you get out okay?”  
“I called a bloody cab.”  
  
It hadn’t been Alex’s devil card, I mused. There are three figures on it, right? Alex had been wrong to claim the monopoly on the thing. He wasn’t the only one trapped, limiting himself to a place where he couldn’t be happy. He may have built the prison but we were chained in it together, with the three of us. It was hers, it was mine, just as it was his. Our devil card.

“Were you planning on seeing Alex again soon?”  
“No.”  
“Okay. I won’t tell you that I met you here today. If you agree with that?”  
“I agree. He doesn’t have to know.”  
“He sure doesn’t.”  
“Hey, um… sorry. What’s your name?”  
“It’s Sue,” she said. Through the bitterness, her mouth showed a small hint of a smile.   
“Sue.” I made the car keys jingle a bit. Nervous tic. “Did he ever say anything about others? Besides the two of us? Ever seen him with somebody else?”  
“No, never. You?”  
“Nope.”  
“Alex has a way of making you think you are the only one he’s ever been with. He’s very talented in concealing the truth. But I’m sure there are others.”  
The little smile became a broader smile, albeit sadder and more sarcastic than before. “I think it’s safe to say he has a type.”  
That made me blush, for some reason.   
We shook hands before we went our separate ways. Two satellites who should never have been in each other’s orbit, briefly chatting about the man they were circling. She had small hands but they had a strong grip, and a tall, confident posture. It was no mystery why Alex found her attractive. Facing her, standing beside the car in the pale daylight, the contrast of her red lips and short, dark hair stood out.   
“I wish you all the best,” I said, meaning every word.  
“Thank you,” she said. “For your time. And your kindness.”  
“Same to you. I really appreciate… what you did.”  
She chuckled. “I mainly did it for myself. No need to flatter me.”  
“No, I’m serious. It must have taken a lot of courage.”  
“Okay. Thank you,” she said, casting her eyes down shyly. “The best of luck to you, too, then.”  
“Take care.”  
“Goodbye, Miles.”  
“Goodbye, Sue.”  
I watched her as she walked away from me, the same way she had come here.

There were a few things I needed to do, both very easy and not too time-consuming.   
One: I went home and gathered all of the things I knew were Alex’s. The piles of clothes on my chair, my floor. It was likely that I would find a few lost socks, bracelets or wristbands here and there in the next few months. Those things always turn up months later, when you’re vacuuming behind the washing machine or under the bed. I would deal with them when the time would come. The rest all went in two big moving boxes and into the back of the Mercedes. I figured he wouldn’t be coming back for his stuff. There was nothing there with his name on it, nothing that could point directly to him. They meant nothing to a guy with that kind of money to spare. I might as well collect it and bring it back. I’m not a fan of throwing out perfectly good clothes.  
Two: I wrote my resignation letter. Neatly outlined, simple layout. To the point. _I am aware of your term of notice of one month as mentioned in our employment contract. I realise that I will not be able to claim any outstanding salary payments for October considering the sudden cancellation from my side_. That sort of thing.   
The letter wouldn’t make it to Pinegrove until Tuesday. By the time I was done with it, it was already past seven. I decided to post it right away, just to get it over with. I turned it into a stroll around my part of town, ending at the Indian place I used to go to all the time. The smells were mouth-watering. I guess I was hungry, in a way. Everything looked delicious as ever and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I had stopped coming here. I got some takeout and brought it home.   
On the couch, with the telly on and my plate on my lap, I started messaging my friends again. I was careful. I didn’t mention anything about Alex, I dodged all questions from Steven. Seeing their words pop up on my screen, beneath their names, was a source of great comfort, even if none of them knew. It was okay. They would be there for me when I was ready. They would understand. I sighed, a bittersweet grin on my face.  
“I love you lot to bits,” I typed and laid the phone to my side. The subsequent buzzing told me everything I needed to know. I didn’t even have to read what they had sent me.


	15. Other expenses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It seems that Miles's adventure as a private chauffeur has come to its end. Not sure where else to go, he reluctantly knocks on his former employer's door once again.

Pinegrove wanted the car back and they wanted it _now_. It was the first thing they made poor old Samantha ask me when she phoned me about my resignation. I was supposed to deliver it back to them whenever convenient, but preferably within the day.   
“Fine, I can drop it there later today.”  
“That would be most kind of you, Mr. Kane. There’ll be a person there whom you can give the registration certificate to.”  
“Great. Perfect.”  
“That helps us a lot, thank you, really.” I could hear a slight hesitation in her voice before she continued. “If you don’t mind me asking, could you tell me your reasons for resigning?”  
I had expected them to ask. A company like Pinegrove would be mad not to keep track of these things; after all, they were matchmakers.   
“Personal reasons.”  
“I see.” Some typing was done. “Then we will finalise things on our end. You will get paid for the entire week, since you have worked within it, and you will also receive some outstanding payments you are entitled to along with the final salary that were originally schedule to be paid in December. You can expect the payments on your account before the end of next week.”  
More money for my Florence fund. This experience could have been worse. Imagine if I wouldn’t have been paid for it.  
“I wish you all the best in the future, Mr. Kane, and would like to sincerely thank you for your efforts while under our employment.”  
Bye, Samantha. I hope you find a more exciting job, soon.

Before I left the car I drove over to Alex’s haunted mansion, for one last time. I stopped the car near the gate, out of sight from the security cameras. The ones I knew about, that is.  
When I squinted my eyes I could see the pale white of the walls, at the end of the driveway. They had impressed me, once. They had bedazzled me, as a backdrop for my secret sweetheart as he paced on the tiles beside his pool. I had dreamt about them. Alex had dragged me into fearing them. Peculiar how they didn’t do anything for me, now.   
I carried the boxes with Alex’s stuff out of the trunk and put them next to the gate. Even though chances that somebody with bad intentions would wander over here, to this lonely place, and find them, were very slim, I didn’t want to play around with belongings that weren’t mine. So, I entered the code on the gate. It was still valid; they hadn’t changed it yet. Not waiting for an answer I stepped back to the car and left the premises, never to return again.

I was glad to be rid of the car. No complaints about its handling. That had been flawless and I couldn’t have asked for a better vehicle. The problem was, like my resignation, more on the personal side. The S 600 had been similar to the charmless hotel I had met Sue at: distant, empty, too polished to ever be personal. The leather seats were cold to the touch. They had been made with the objective in mind of leaving an impression of a well-off man (or a woman, but car companies have very specific marketing strategies and this car was explicitly catering to their idea of masculinity). No place of shelter for a human being.  
I found myself looking beside me. Checking the backseats in the rearview mirror. Knowing that there was no one there and there were no final glimpses to be caught. No prolonged stares. No dark eyes finding mine.  
I toyed with the temptation of stopping the car on the side of the road, getting out and just crying for a bit. The road I was on was in one of the more scenic edges of the city. There wasn’t a soul around who would see me. Maybe a herd of sheep, at most. It would be nice to take a walk in the grass, maybe start running. It would be liberating. Cathartic. I didn’t do it, afraid that if I gave in I wouldn’t want to get back in the car again. Just sitting in it made my skin crawl. The stale air on its interior was so heavy with memories it was suffocating. I had to retain my composure if I was to meet with the Pinegrove people in a short while.   
Having to take roads I had often taken with Alex beside me did not make it easier. The traffic lights where I had stopped so many times, where we had talked about nothing. I promised myself that once I got back home I would do nothing, except treat myself to a good, stiff drink.

Teddy couldn’t hide his excitement when he saw me walking up the Musgrave parking lot. He practically ran towards me.   
“Kane!” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. “Sure weren’t expecting to see you again. How long has it been?”  
“Couple ‘o months.”  
“That’s right.” The moment when the realisation sank in that me being back might not be a cause for celebration was visible on his face. “So,” he tried, carefully, “what’s going on? No jobs for your steady client?”  
“No. Not anymore.”  
“Oh.” He frowned, biting the inside of his cheek. “Is he out of town, or something?”  
“No. I had to quit.”  
“Quit? Things didn’t work out?”  
“Unfortunately not.”  
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” We stood next to Vince’s lair for a moment, coworkers once again, albeit awkwardly. “Even though I’m glad to see you again, of course.”  
“Thanks, Teddy. I’m glad to see you again, too.”  
He was all smiles. It was heartwarming, to be honest.  
“So, going to see the old boss, are ya?”  
“Yeah. I am. Is he in?” This was a silly question. Vince was never out.  
“He’s in, yeah.”  
“Thanks, Teddy.”

I tapped Vince’s door.   
“Patience, please,” his raspy voice boomed through the whole makeshift office, making the thin, synthetic walls shake. I turned away from the door to inspect some of the notices pinned to the wall.   
‘RECEIPTS ON MONDAYS’ an ancient piece of paper read.  
‘HAND WASHING / NO HAND SHAKING’ was next to it.  
‘NO ID? NO JOBS’ was a relatively new one. I felt around in my pockets. And yes, there it was: I was still carrying my old Musgrave ID in one of my inner pockets. It was the size of a debit card. Its design was entirely void of creativity. Black with white letters, a boring font.   
  
MUSGRAVE TAXI SERVICES  
KANE, MILES  
Employee no.: 0027 008  
Date of birth: Mar 17, 1986  
Office: +44 (0) 161 …..

I hadn’t thrown out my paper receipts, either. They were still sitting in a drawer somewhere at home. Alex must still have one of those lying around, from that first time he had been in my old cab. Not that anyone would be able to find it in that mess of a house. I wasn’t having any illusions about what he might have done with it. He wasn’t like me. He wasn’t the one holding on to notes I had scribbled while on the phone. I sighed. I really should be throwing those things out.  
“Yes, come in!” Vince yelled through the door.  
I opened the door. Looked like Vince’s physiotherapist hadn’t had any significant successes yet; his posture was as bad as ever. Leaned over his keyboard, his nose almost pressed to his monitor, he didn’t even give me a glance.  
“What is it?”  
“Hi, Vince,” I said.  
“Kane?” He turned to me. “It is you! What on earth are you doing here? Got laid off, did ya?”  
“No, I did not.”  
“Then what the hell happened? Looking for some extra coins to go suit shopping? Cos we have plenty of work available. As always. We could’ve used you the past months!”  
“I quit.”  
He raised his eyebrows almost comically high. “What’s ailing you? A temporary lapse of judgement?”  
“Nothing of the sort.”  
“Then what happened?” Correcting himself, he continued: “You don’t have to tell me anything, it’s not my business. Just with that kind of paycheck it’s… well, baffling to me to see you back in again so quickly.”  
“I know. It is baffling.” I laughed, at Vince? At myself? At the world? as I looked at the ceiling, my hands in my pockets. Finding the familiar, old ceiling boards was strangely comforting. I realised that I wanted to tell Vince what happened. But I didn’t know where to start. I should’ve known that he would ask me these questions; anyone would. I hadn’t thought this through.  
“I’m sorry I asked, I didn’t mean to pry.”  
“No, no, it’s okay, it’s okay.” I pointed at the chair on the other side of his desk. “Do you have a minute?”  
“Please, go ahead.” Still with those big, round eyes, he put his work aside. And I had hoped he wouldn’t make it into a big deal. I took a few breaths. I needed to ground myself in Vince’s old chair, somehow.   
“I, um… I had some difficulties. I resigned a couple of days ago.”  
“You resigned. Didn’t get fired?”  
“No. I felt it was better to cancel the contract, myself.”  
“Well, that kind of thing doesn’t just happen. Especially not with a driver like you.”  
“It doesn’t.”  
“Trouble with Pinegrove? I don’t often do business with them. Were they treating you okay?”  
“Oh, Pinegrove was fine.”  
Vince looked at me for a long time. I wasn’t sure what he was seeing but I felt very small in his gaze. Or maybe I was transparent to him. Vince can be quite the diviner, apparently. Because what he said was right on the money.  
“Something happened with that guy. Your client. The famous singer from- I forgot whatever they’re called, I don’t follow that shite. Didn’t it?”  
I didn’t answer; my face did it for me.  
“Was he very difficult? That’s common with famous people. They’re used to getting the star treatment…”  
“No, nothing like that. He was…” God, why did my throat feel the way it did? “…he was…” I clenched my fists, then grabbed the edges of my seat, not understanding why this was so hard. “We got along great, it just…” I swallowed and looked Vince in his eyes. “It didn’t work out.”  
“Ah. I see.” The face he made was very unfortunate and I gathered he was feeling sorry for me. “Something happened with you _and_ with him. That’s…” he spread his fingers in a helpless gesture, as if he wanted to take hold of the air. “I’m really sorry that this happened to you. You didn’t deserve that.”  
I couldn’t help it. I make a noise; I sobbed. I pressed my hands to my face knowing it was already too late to try and hide my emotions. I couldn’t hide anything from Vince. He knew. I had a feeling he knew everything. It felt as if I had kept a diary of all that had gone down, and he had somehow got his hands on it and read the whole story.  
“It’s alright, lad,” he said. I was still holding my face in my hands, so I didn’t see him get up and walk towards me. I almost jumped when I felt his hand on my shoulder.  
“Hey, now. It’s gonna be alright.”  
There I was, crying in Vince’s office. Wow. There has to be a first time for everything, I suppose.   
“I know I sound like a senile grandpa who doesn’t get it,” he said, “but I can assure you that I do. These things happen more often than you’d think. There’s nothing you could have done about it. That’s the thing about this job. You never know who’s stepping in the cab with you.”  
Unwanted visions came to me in sepia tones. Visions of a much younger Vince with a blonde bombshell film star in a killer dress sitting next to him. I couldn’t even laugh at them. When I didn’t stop crying he shuffled off to get me some water. He handed me one of the blue plastic cups and I gratefully accepted. After the first few sips I already felt a bit better.  
“Thank you.”  
“No worries, Kane.”  
There were voices outside. Federico, back from a job, I guessed, and Teddy. I huddled up in embarrassment. Were they coming this way? I was not in any state to deal with them. Vince had noticed them, too, and walked towards the door.  
“I’ll hold them off. Okay?” He looked back at me, at my no doubt red and swollen eyes. “Just stay here as long as you like.”

Needless to say, Vince Musgrave welcomed me back to his fleet (or should I say ‘flock’?) immediately. It was weird how easy it was to get back in my old routine. Before October was over I was completely settled back in. Getting up in the morning had become effortless again. As for falling asleep at night, well, I was getting there.  
The clients were the same as ever. Some were chatty, others didn’t say a word and spent their time in my vicinity huddled up with their phones. Some were polite, others complained I wasn’t getting them where they needed to be quick enough. I rolled through my jobs, back in my old Mercedes. Vince switched it back from Teddy to me, to do me a favour; as an ancient cabbie he knew the importance of the familiarity of your own vehicle. The models were exactly the same, but still. I was happy to have it back. It was less smooth, it didn’t have as mean an engine (downgrading from a V8 to a V6, sadly), but it was my own old Mercedes and driving it was pleasant. Soothing, in a way. The smell of fish and chips Teddy had left in it dissipated within a single day, thank God.  
Vince hadn’t told anyone about my ordeal and neither had I. Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that my colleagues were aware. How did that sense come about? Well, the first time I spoke to Federico again he asked: “Are you alright, mate?” and offered me a cigarette. I declined but appreciated he was trying to make me feel better.  
“You look on point, by the way.”  
“Coming from you, that means a lot, Federico.”  
“That’s right.” He took a drag of his cigarette. “As for this outfit I have zero remarks. Eight out of ten.”  
“Oh, come on, zero complaints and still no ten out of ten?”  
“You should know, Kane, that your grade has hovered around a five for years. It’s only been recent that you have stepped it up.”  
“If you say so.”  
No wonder. The snazzy looks had been partially Federico-inspired, but they were certainly Alex-fueled and would not have come about without him. Federico had probably picked up on my spirits dropping after what he had said. Trying to cheer me up, he asked: “Let’s get a pint with the boys this Friday, eh?”   
I had feared I wasn’t ready to be social again, not yet; but now that there was an invitation I thought, hell, why not? It turned out to be a good decision. We had a very nice evening at our trusted pub. Like everyone, I was completely pissed, but I was happy when I walked back home. The cool night air was refreshing and sobering. There were clear skies above me and a half moon was shining.   
It was fine, I thought to myself. It was all going to be fine.   
I made an appointment with my friends for the next day. That night was even better than Friday. Again, an ungodly amount of beer and other drinks. And an incredibly fun night with the lads and ladies. It was as if nothing had really changed. As if everything in my regular life had simply been put on hold for a short while and was now back in live mode. It was odd but a relief at the same time. Perhaps I would tell them, one day, I figured, sitting with all of them at our table in the corner, near the bar. It might have to wait until we were residing in a retirement home, but perhaps I would even drop Alex’s name; see if it rang any bells. I guess he was familiar to a majority. Alistair was of a different era and only listened to his beloved classic rock station. Ben was far too occupied with his nightmare of a job to even care for any of the arts. The rest probably knew him. I would have to be careful around Eleanor and Rukaiyah. They’d always go to Parklife together and hadn’t missed one since it had started. When we moved from beers to gin I was haunted by the suspicion that one of the girls might have a cd or two of Alex’s lying around her apartment. I even thought I could remember seeing them there, at Ellie’s place. The idea was enough to make me feel nauseous.  
“Excuse me,” I mumbled and got up, walking outside.  
After a minute I was joined by Rukaiyah. Eleanor would’ve come with since they did everything together, but when I left the table she had been wedged in between Alistair and Steven, having a serious laughter attack and very wobbly on her feet.  
“Hey, Miles.”  
“Hi.”  
“Just popped out to see if you were okay.”  
I sighed. Seemed like everybody was checking on me, these days. “I’m fine. But thank you.”  
“No problem.”  
We watched some teenagers stumble across the square. They tried to sing a football cheer. It was hardly an attempt at all.  
“If you want to talk about it… rant to someone,” she laughed, “you know you are always welcome at my place. Ellie and I are having dinner together next Wednesday, so feel free to join us.”  
“That’s sweet.”  
“But?”  
“Not really a ‘but’. I’d love to come. It might be difficult for me to rant to you guys, though. Not in an emotional sense.”  
“In a legal sense?” she gave me a cunning look.   
“Okay, how many of you know about this?”  
“We don’t exactly know.” She shrugged. “It’s just that we all kind of made the same guess.”  
“I can’t leave you people alone even for a short while, can I?”  
“I’m afraid not.”  
“As long as you keep it with us.”  
“You know me. You don’t need to ask. Besides, none of us have the slightest clue who he was.”  
“Good.”  
“Whoever he was. He was a fool to break things off with you. That’s all I have to say about it.”  
Maybe he was. It had never been for me to decide.   
“I’m gonna go back inside. Ellie needs our help.”  
“If I’m not mistaken- I have been out of the loop for a while, of course- it’s Steven’s turn to switch her gin with water.”  
“No! It’s our shared responsibility. As a group.”  
“Somebody has to down those gin tonics.”  
“That role is definitely yours, tonight.”

Pinegrove’s final goodbye was decent, as they had consistently proven themselves to be. My last paycheck arrived around the end of October. As promised, the first week was paid in full. Attached to the paycheck were a few more sheets of paper. There was a report on the Mercedes’s condition when I had returned it to them. The report showed no damages, meaning there would be no additional costs for me. A lucky financial break. If there had been even the smallest thing wrong with it I would have been out of half my paycheck.  
There was also a reminder of the secrecy agreement I had signed for them when I had agreed to become one of their private drivers. If I were to tell a single soul about my client- his name, date of birth, address, phone number or any other personal information, or, and this was even more restrictive; any information about him that would reasonably allow the other person to deduce his identity, I would be fined by Pinegrove and that fine was in the tens of thousands. I was to delete every piece of personal information of Alex’s I carried. Erase his number from my phone, delete his address from my satnav app. Fear not, my agency friends; I had already done so.  
The secrecy agreement explicitly did not end with the termination of my employment contract. It would be active for at least ten years. Which I could understand. I had never looked them up (why would I, when the living, breathing man was in my house, in my bed, on my lap) but I remembered the photoshoots, the interviews, the drama websites Alex had told me about. It wasn’t just my secret to keep. It was possible he was afraid of me and what I could theoretically spill to the people willing to publish things about him. Luckily for him, it would never be more than a theory. My mouth was shut. I was not that kind of man.  
The last piece of paper had the same layout as my paycheck. It mentioned a small amount of pounds. It read ‘Reimbursement of other expenses’. It puzzled me until I noticed the even smaller letters underneath it. ‘Added to total amount at request of client’.  
I laid the paper on my table and leaned back on my couch. Well, Alex _had_ promised he would pay me back. It wasn’t much and it definitely wasn’t precise, because he was far worse at keeping tabs on expenses than I was, but it was enough to cover half of the meals I had cooked, the toiletries and the clothes I had purchased for him while he was with me. The beers in the evenings, the eggs he had taken for lunch, the toast he had put them on. To my own surprise, this little gesture made me smile. He sure was something.

Today, in my own taxi cab, at the airport, he was immeasurably far away from me. Even if he had been standing right there; ten steps from where I was at most. I could have waved at him and he would have seen me. He would have recognised me. If he had ran towards me he would have been in the car with me in seconds. He could also have been on a different planet altogether and it wouldn’t have made any difference.   
My number might still be in his contacts. It might have been right under his thumb at times. Who knows if he hadn’t had his moments of weakness, his moments of doubt? He had given his all to me, if not for long. That stays with you. It must count for something.  
He hadn’t called me, hadn’t messaged me in all of these months. I suppose if Alex Turner is through with you, he wants to do everything in his power to make you believe he is through with you. It was fine. I would manage. In the end, I wasn’t even sure what I felt, looking back at those months when he had been the center of my universe, the focal point of everything.   
I wondered, sometimes. Wondered if he still threw those parties, if he still got his fortune told by scantily-clad ‘new-age birds’ at festival after parties. Wondered if he still had those nights where he woke up screaming. If the devil was still chasing after him. I wondered if there was anyone there willing to be with him when that happened. For all that he meant to me, I sincerely hoped that there was someone. When he had asked me to skip ‘Dreams’ on my ‘Rumours’ record I believe it wasn’t the ‘dreams’ part he had a problem with. Instead, it had probably been the ‘loneliness’ part.

I’m a firm believer in coincidence. Sheer luck is the only god I know. It sounds a bit cynical. It’s just the way I have always been. When one of Alex’s new songs popped up on the station I had on, I didn’t attach any more meaning to it. I had to admit it was remarkable, though, after I had just spotted him, in the wild, so to speak. My thinking mind knew that it wasn’t anything special. The odds were the same as they were on any other day. In spite of my rational state of mind I couldn’t help feeling a bit flimsy when I recognised his voice. It had been so long.  
It was a new one. I had never heard it before and I had listened to their whole discography. Like a groupie. I was glad nobody had seen me do that.   
I looked in the mirrors. My client, whom I had picked up near the destination of the Belgian guy, was a bald business guy in his early forties. He was looking out the window and had nothing else to occupy him but the radio. Would he object to me changing the channel? Not likely, no. He might not even notice me doing so. But wouldn’t it be better to leave it on, to listen to it, to work through it? This same thing was going to happen more often after today. His band was still going strong, showing no signs of a fading popularity, especially now with their new material slowly getting distributed to the masses. The ‘spell of inactivity’ he had spent with me had been over quickly, hadn’t it? If I were to believe the news he and the guys had been working their asses off. Not that I was actively searching for news about them. I can promise you I did not. It’s just incredible how much useless information you take in when you’re in a car all day, mindlessly letting the radio whisper the happenings of the world to you.   
It would be good for me. It would be healthy. After all, one day this sharp pain would have to fade into a dull ache, wouldn’t it?   
I took a deep breath. I knew myself; I was ready for this. I did not touch the radio. I let it play the song, beginning to end.  
It was different than what I had come to recognise as their musical style. A diversion of sorts. Which was good; I think musicians should never stop developing themselves and their talents. In creativity, any standstill is a possible regression. It was slower. The guitars were less prominent than they had been on previous albums, where they had taken center stage. There was an eighties-inspired synthetiser and there were violins at a certain point, if you could believe it. To add to my torment the song was also very long, nearing five minutes. A song length that wouldn’t usually get air time on the radio. Alex and his band probably were just too much of a household name to ignore. I couldn’t deny its catchiness, its charm. It was solid. It was beautiful. Especially Alex. He was the main attraction, demanding the undying attention of everyone who listened. Beckoning me back to his planet in a lower timbre than he had sung in on the tracks I knew.   
I didn’t catch all the words. I shuddered when he started singing some sweet, typical nothings that reminded me of us. Even if they probably didn’t have anything to do with me.   
“Caught in your headlights”, he sung. “Lost in my house”.   
“Take me home”. “Let me go”.  
At the end I was a ruffled mess of a man. On the inside, only. My client would never fathom the earth-shattering test I had just been put through. Again, a sign of my undying professionalism.   
  
“And here we are.” I had safely delivered the bald Londoner to his destination: a massive office complex that looked to be ninety percent glazing.   
“Many thanks,” he said with a friendly smile. He paid with his card and stepped out of the car.   
“Have a good day, lad.”  
“Same to you, Sir.”  
He walked towards the broad revolving doors, black laptop case in his hand, ready for his meeting. I smiled a bit, sitting alone on the driver’s seat. I was still looking into courses, to learn something new, to move on to the next chapter in my career. My life. There were times where I had slightly panicked, afraid that I would never move on from my taxi job, and that I was running out of time. At this moment, on this day, though, I was perfectly content, right where I was. It was okay. It was all okay.  
“Kane!” Vince’s voice over the handsfree set disturbed my late afternoon musings.   
“Yes, Musgrave, Sir!” I shouted back at my dashboard.  
“I’ve got another one for you. Can you be in Warrington around five?”  
I checked my clock. “If I leave right now.”  
“Well, do that, then.”  
I put the car in first gear and left the parking spot I had been on. “Working on it.”  
“There’s a good kid. I’ll message you the address, so if you’d be so kind, please do this job for me, alright? Everyone else’s occupied. As usual.”  
“No worries, Vince.”  
He gave a sigh of deep relief. “Thanks, Kane. See you around, eh?”  
“Bye, Vince.”  
And off I went.

END  
  
Sunday, the 29th of March, 2020  
16:15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear all of you, I just wanted to thank you sooooo much for reading and giving me so many comments and kudos and positive feedback. I honestly never expected to get so much out of this. The story became much longer than I had expected, I had a lot more fun with it than I had initially thought, and I have really enjoyed uploading it bit by bit over the past few weeks. I'm genuinely a little sad that it's come to an end but I am grateful for the ride I had with you <3   
> Until next time!


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